This blog covers the chapter “Targeting”. The topics included in this post are:
Targeting Ads
- Targeting makes your ad more effective
- Targeting can be done by geographic location, day of week, time of day, gender and age, device
- Geographic targeting (in US, Canada, UK, France) includes Country/Region, State/Province, Metro area, Cities/Town
- In Singapore, it can only done at country level
- When a country is chosen in geo targeting, the time zone shown will be local to that country
- Device targeting only applies to search ads
- Targeting can be set at the campaign level for all ad groups under them. It be overridden by specific targeting for ad groups
- Incremental bid can on a targeting factor. If you would like your ad to run on all locations on the base bid, you can select the option
- When you target audience by age and gender, your ads will be displayed to other customers also.
Keyword Match Options
- Keyword match option exposes your ads to a wider audience and targets your keyword to specific search queries
- Campaign exclusion helps improve click through rate
- Keyword match options can be Exact, Phrase or Broad. With negative keywords, you can specify search query words that you want to ignore
- Broad match: Expose your ads to wide audience
Phrase match: Help prevent your ad from being displayed for irrelevant variations of your keyword 
Exact match: Precisely match your keyword and lower costs 
Negative keyword: Use when you know a term does not apply to your business 
Which match option to choose? By default, MS uses broad match for keywords 
Negative keywords applied at the ad group level apply to all the keywords in the ad group unless you add negative keywords to specific keywords Website exclusion: To prevent ads from appearing on websites that do not further your advertising goals
Content Ads
- Content ads allow you to distribute ads to webpages that display content related to your ads
- You only page for the clicks you get for content ads
- Content ads are beneficial to improve your ROI, reach new customers, boost your brand, enhance your existing campaign
- Content ads can be chosen based on keyword or network/websites
- You cannot change the bid type once an ad is created.