Custom Affinity Audiences quickly became a favorite for businesses small and large for prospecting, reaching qualified customers, and supporting top-funnel objectives.

What Are Affinity Audiences?

Firstly, let’s quickly define what “Affinity Audiences” are, before we dive into the world of custom. You can think of affinity audiences as similar to TV audiences – wildly generalized types of people that watch your varying TV channels.

So BBC One would represent (kind of) older demographics, people interested in politics and news, whereas E4 would represent your younger demographics (I guess), perhaps those chilling around in their university dorms… you get the idea. Although there is some truth in this system of categorization, it is very broad and presumptuous.

What is Custom Affinity Audience Targeting?

Google defines custom affinity audiences as letting advertisers define whom they want to reach across the web, on any screen. By factoring in consumers’ most recent passions and ongoing interests, your message always reaches the right users.

Custom affinity audience targeting can be set-up by following this path.

display > targeting > Interests & remarketing > Custom affinity audiences

The Advantages of Custom Affinity Audience Targeting

Compared to other audience targeting methods, Custom Affinity targeting offers advertisers several unique advantages.

These include the ability to target:

• An audience based on specific URLs
• Users that visit your competitors’ websites
• Consumers that use specific keywords and search terms
• Consumers who use specific apps

How to Create a Custom Affinity Audience

Creating your own custom affinity audiences is quite easy. Here’s how:

• Create a new Display Campaign(or edit an existing one)
• Go to Audiences
• Select Affinity and Custom Affinity

At the bottom, select Custom Affinity Audience.

You are now given the option to name your new audience and input specificinterests, URLs, places, and apps.

After you’ve finished inputting your variables, you can preview the estimated size of your custom affinity audience

When to Use Custom Affinity Audiences

Do any of the initiatives below describe your advertising goals?

• Branding
• More controlled targeting on GDN
• Advertising tailored content to specific people
• Increasing market reach while driving valuable actions on your site

Considering the very nature of the way we set CAAs up, they are practical for so many different businesses and situations.

There are literally millions of different ways we can reach relevant audiences, simply by playing around with different items (interests, URLs, places, apps).

Short conclusion

Custom Affinity Audiences allow for more control on the GDN. They perform best as a creative way to reach new users in a cost-effective way, and help to drive incremental conversions.