The fastest way to burn money on Google Ads is not bidding too high. It is handing your ad to people who were never going to buy. Thousands of impressions can look busy while almost nobody who counts actually comes in. Targeting is the layer built to plug that leak: it does not decide what your ad looks like or which channel it appears on (that is the campaign type), it decides who your ad is put in front of. For a small Vancouver business the payoff is tangible. The same budget that, scattered across the whole city, mostly goes to waste can be narrowed to "the people most likely to spend", so that every pound lands on someone who has a real chance of becoming a customer. This article first builds the big picture of the targeting layer, so you can then see exactly which group each specific targeting method is fencing in.
Who is this article for? ❓
If you run a business in Vancouver, already know you should be advertising on Google (or already are), yet keep feeling that "a fair bit is going out, but the people coming in aren't quite right", this is worth a few minutes. It will not walk you through which box to tick in the account; instead it gives you a judgement: who are my customers, and how do I fence them in? Get that right and you stop paying for irrelevant clicks, and you can follow what whoever manages your ads is saying. If almost anyone could be a potential buyer (a city-wide convenience service, say), the trade-offs of targeting matter less to you, and you can skim.
First, be clear which layer targeting is
Google Ads is built in nested layers. The outermost is the campaign (the ad "type"), which decides which channel and what form the ad takes: Search, Display, Video or Shopping. Inside that sit ad groups and the actual ad copy. Then targeting is a separate layer altogether, handling something quite different: who the ad is shown to. These two layers are often confused, and telling them apart matters. A Display ad is a type (an image ad placed across all sorts of websites), whereas "winning back people who have already visited your website" is called remarketing, a targeting method that can be layered onto Display and several other types, and is not itself a campaign type. In short, type answers "what the ad looks like and where it shows", targeting answers "who sees it". The two are independent and can be freely combined.
The core idea: narrowing from "the whole city" to "the people most likely to buy"
Picture targeting as a stack of sieves: each one you add keeps out people who clearly will not buy, so the budget concentrates. The sieves you will reach for most often cluster around four questions:
- Where are they? (geographic targeting): show ads by where customers are, or where they regularly go. For a local business this is usually the first and most important sieve. Advertise only within a few kilometres of the clinic or shop, and someone passing through another district simply never sees it.
- What are they searching for, or reading? (keyword and content targeting): Search ads are triggered by the keywords a customer types; Display ads can instead use a page's topics or content keywords to place your ad beside relevant pages.
- Who are they? (demographics and audience segments): you can filter by demographics such as age, gender, household income and parental status (household-income targeting is available in Canada); or use Google's audience segments, such as an affinity segment of people with a long-standing interest in something, or an in-market segment of people who are actively comparing and close to buying.
- Have they dealt with you before? (remarketing / Your Data): re-reach people who have visited your website, used your app, or are on your customer list. Google now groups these under "Your Data" segments (formerly remarketing). Because they are the closest to converting, this is often the highest-return sieve of all.
Each of these sieves is what a separate article in the B series goes on to cover in detail. Most targeting is set at the campaign or ad group level (within one campaign you can give different ad groups different targeting), and several sieves can be stacked: the tighter the fence, the less waste, though stack too many and the audience gets squeezed too narrow, so there is a balance to strike.
An example: high-end bespoke furniture, without scattering money across the city
Suppose you make high-end bespoke furniture in Vancouver: high ticket, few customers, carefully chosen. With no targeting and an ad running city-wide, most of the people who see it have neither the budget nor the need, and the money burns away on people who will not order. Do it differently. First use geographic targeting to confine the ads to recognised affluent neighbourhoods such as West Vancouver, the British Properties or Shaughnessy. To sharpen further, layer on a higher household-income bracket in demographics, or attach an in-market segment of people recently researching bespoke or luxury furniture. Stack those sieves and the budget concentrates on the small group who can genuinely afford it and may well be in the market right now.
And do not forget the person at the other end of the ad. A homeowner in West Vancouver, browsing home-décor content, sees a bespoke-furniture ad that happens to fit: it "feels relevant to them" rather than an out-of-the-blue interruption. Someone living elsewhere, well outside your customer base, is not pestered by it at all. Done right, targeting saves your budget and buys a tidier customer experience. Both ends gain.
Where this sits in your business
Targeting is the key step in marketing and customer acquisition that "sifts out the right people". It is one of three layers in the same game as ad type and bidding: type decides the form and where it shows, targeting decides who sees it, bidding decides how much you pay for each opportunity. And it works hand in glove with your website. Targeting brings the right people to the door; the website catches them and makes them want to get in touch.
What happens if targeting is off
A common outcome is precisely "a fair bit went out, but the people coming in were wrong". Targeting too broad, and the ad is scattered across a crowd who will not come in, the budget nibbled away by irrelevant clicks. Targeting too narrow, or fencing in the wrong people, and you may miss customers you could have reached. When people conclude "Google Ads doesn't work", the trouble is often not the ads themselves but this layer: never having thought through "who should see it", so the money goes to people it could never reach.
When it is worth sorting your targeting out
A few common moments: you are just starting to advertise and want to avoid wasting budget from day one; you are already advertising but find most enquiries coming in are off (asking for things you do not do, or outside your service area); your customers have a clear geographic or group profile (local only, or aimed at one kind of person); or your budget is limited and you want every pound to count. Meet any one of these, and it is worth thinking carefully about "who the ads should go to".
Leave this to 5U Website
Targeting may look like ticking a few boxes in the account, but the hard part is the judgement: who exactly are your customers, and which combination of sieves fences them in most accurately? Fence too wide and you burn money; too narrow and you cannot reach anyone. Here is the honest opinion we give most Vancouver clients: for a typical local shop, getting the geographic layer right is most of the battle, and we would not bother stacking income, interest or in-market segments on top from day one. Those extra layers tend to earn their keep only for higher-ticket or genuinely niche businesses (the bespoke-furniture case above), or once you have run long enough to have real conversion data to narrow on. Pile them on too early and you usually just shrink your reach without much to show for it. Over our years building websites and doing digital marketing for Vancouver businesses, we have seen plenty of accounts where the money went out and the wrong people came in, and the trouble almost always traced back to targeting that was never sorted. What we do for clients is first work out what your ideal customer looks like, where they are and what they search for, then add only the layers that fit the business, and keep narrowing as the data comes in, so the budget goes, as far as possible, only to "people who might buy". If you are about to advertise, or have an account that has long shown no results, take a look at our website design and digital marketing services, or send an email describing your situation. We usually reply within one to two business days.
To go deeper, read on: the overview of what Google Ads is and what it can do, the campaign types that decide "where it shows", the bidding strategies that decide "how much you spend", and the single most important piece for a local business, geographic targeting by location.
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