Targeting

Detailed explanation

Targeting defines the audience for a campaign before creative and budget decisions are finalized. Common types include demographic (age, gender, income), geographic (country, city, radius around a location), behavioral (past purchases, site visits, app usage), contextual (the content or keywords a person is engaging with), and lookalike or similar-audience targeting built from an existing customer list.

Broader targeting increases reach and lowers CPMs but dilutes relevance; narrower targeting improves message fit and usually conversion rate, but shrinks the available audience and can raise cost per result as the pool gets exhausted. Most platforms now blend manual targeting inputs with automated optimization — Google's audience signals, Meta's Advantage+ — so targeting today is as much about feeding the algorithm the right signals as it is about manually excluding groups.

For “what is targeting” or “types of ad targeting” searches, this entry is a starting point. Read it together with CPC and CTR to judge whether a given targeting setup is actually reaching people who convert.