One of the most profitable tactics for targeting Google Ads is retargeting: showing ads to people who are already familiar with your business. But if you still think that “retargeting” means a display campaign that chases users around the web with banner ads, you’re missing out on how your “Data Segments” really work today.
Let’s explore how you can use your proprietary audience data in new ways, and what mistakes to avoid in 2026 and beyond.
What are your “data segments” in Google Ads?
Retargeting means showing ads to people who are already familiar with your business. Google uses the catchy term “Your data segments” to refer to all the retargeting lists in your account.
What are the types of retargeting in Google Ads?
A variety of retargeting methods are available in Google Ads. They look at what you’ll find on other ad platforms like Meta, LinkedIn, or TikTok. I find it helpful to group them into four categories:
- Website visitors: This is the standard — people who visited your website. You collect this data using Google Tag Manager or Google Analytics.
- Application users: If you have a mobile app, you can pull data from Firebase or other third-party analytics tools into Google Ads for retargeting.
- Customer Matching: This is the “holy grail” of retrograde. You take your first-party business data (email addresses, phone numbers, etc.) and upload it directly to Google Ads, so Google can find those same users across all of its platforms.
- Content contributors: People who have linked to your content on Google-owned properties. Examples include the proportion of users who watched your YouTube videos, or the proportion of users who clicked through to your site from search results (this is called Google Engaged Audience, which we explored in another article).
Should you upload your “data segments” if you don’t plan to retarget?
Many practitioners overlook this detail: your data segments are not limited to an ad to direct.
Even if you don’t have an active retargeting campaign, the presence of this list in your account provides an important signal for Smart Bidding and Optimized Targeting.
For example, when you upload a list of customers, you’re telling Google, “These are the people who actually buy from me.” Even if you never add that list to your audience signal in Performance Max, Google will still use it to understand potential converters and adjust bidding/targeting accordingly.
Similarly, let’s say you’re running only search and shopping campaigns, and you’re using Target ROAS bidding. When Google tries to set the right bid for the right user at the right time, their presence (or lack thereof) in the “part of your data” list is one of the many indicators included in that bid calculation.
How to use retargeting list in Google Ads?
Different campaign types handle audience data differently. It’s important to know the difference so you can plan your targeting strategy accordingly.
- Search, Purchase, Display: For these campaigns, you have three options for your data categories: Targeting, Viewing, Release.
- Guidance means that your ads will only appear if the user is a member of your data segment
- Watching it allows you to see your campaign data sorted by list, without limiting your reach
- Discharge means that your ads will only appear if the user is NOT a member of your data segments.
- Performance Max and app campaigns: In these AI-powered campaigns, you can include segments of your data as part of your audience signal. Performance Max recently added the ability to extract segments of your data.
- Look for Gen: In Demand Gen, you can target and Extract segments of Your data, but there is no “View” option.
If you’re new to resume writing, I find Demand Gen to be the best place to start. It is designed for visual storytelling and works well with Google Engaged Audience or a basic list of website visitors.
If you have some experience with retargeting campaigns, you may want to try the New Customer Acquisition Mode or Customer Retention Mode in PMax or Shopping, as these are powered by your data segments.
What is the biggest mistake to avoid?
Extreme segregation. I know it can be tempting to create 50 different lists: “People who visited the cart on Tuesday,” or “People who viewed three pages but didn’t click on the ‘About’ section.”
Unless you’re running six figures or more every month, this level of granularity isn’t helpful, and may even hurt your campaigns. Google’s AI needs data density to learn. If you divide your audience into smaller pieces, you don’t have enough “similar records” for the system to be fully functional.
Upload your unique data to Google Ads, keep your strategy simple, and let the bidding algorithms do the hard work for you for returning customers.
This article is part of our ongoing Search Engine Land series, Everything you need to know about Google Ads in under 3 minutes. In each episode, Jyll highlights a different aspect of Google Ads, and what you need to know to get the best results from it – all in a quick 3-minute read.
Contributing writers are invited to create content for Search Engine Land and are selected for their expertise and contribution to the search community. Our contributors work under the supervision of editorial staff and contributions are assessed for quality and relevance to our students. Search Engine Land is owned by Semrush. The contributor has not been asked to speak directly or indirectly about Semrush. The opinions they express are their own.
