NEW YouTube Ads Targeting Guide for 2025

People are freaking out because YouTube ads has just removed keyword targeting, placement, targeting, topic targeting, and similar audiences from your Google Ads account. That's right. You can no longer target specific keywords, videos, channels or topics of content on YouTube with YouTube ads. This is a big, big, major update. Because this is huge, right? You can no longer get very specific with the type of content you want to target. For example, here's a post of Bryce and one of the masterminds that I'm partnering with Sam Ovens on where I teach YouTube ads to all the clients inside. And Bryce said, YouTube removing keyword targeting next year. And then he said, we started seeing this notification in our YouTube ad account recently. If you go to your Google Ads account, you will no longer be able to do this. So check this out. Keywords, for example, have been our best targeting so far. Looks like this means we have to go with custom intent or more broad targeting. That's right, Bryce, because you can no longer target specific types of content.

Okay.

And this is only for conversion campaigns. You can still run keywords placements or topics for awareness campaigns. But here at Adspend.com, our goal is to get you more leads, calls and clients with ad spend with YouTube ads, not brand awareness. Right. Because that doesn't make the cash register ring. We're focused on driving leads, calls and clients and getting you more, more revenue. So according to their help article, you can see here, content targeting. Avoid adding content targeting keywords, topics or placements as this may limit your campaign's performance. This was the best strategy that we would always teach for our clients. By far, Keywords were the top performers in every single ad account that we were running. Now you can no longer use those. So how do you adjust? Well, lucky for you, I've put together this video to help you and give you the best targeting options that you can run right, right now. So first things first. Targeting 101. In case you are new here, YouTube ads has two different types of targetings.

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Interest based targeting, intent based targeting. Here's the difference between both of those and what those mean. Interest based targeting means you can target people based on who they are, AKA their interests. Google knows a bunch of data on you and me because we're constantly signed into Gmail and we're constantly browsing websites, clicking on ads, going to Google Maps as well as, you know, just emails that we're getting and opening and all of this data that they can aggregate about you as a person. They then classify you in different subcategories. Of affinity audiences to group you by what you're interested in, which is a broad, broad type of targeting.

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And then the second type of targeting is intent based targeting, meaning you can still target people based on what they're actually searching for, which is still very powerful and one of the best audiences that we use right now. So here's the different type of targeting options that we have available as well as I've built this targeting timeline to give you a representation of what targeting you should start with and what targeting you should use if you really want to scale. This is called the targeting timeline. Here@adspend.com on the right hand side we have this start and scale timeline. And then on the left hand side we have an upside down triangle representing the niche audiences on the bottom and then the more broad audiences at the top. And this is a very good representation that most people don't even consider because a lot of people, when they spend money on YouTube ads, they always complain to me saying that, hey, Brian, I've doubled the budgets on my campaigns, but the cost per lead tripled, the cost per call tripled, I don't know what's going on, Should I lower the budget back down? And what they fail to realize is that a lot of times their offer is just so niche and that when they try to double the budgets, their messaging isn't broad enough to reach more people. For example, if you're someone targeting like, you know, car dealership owners in Germany, and there's only 22,000 people of those alive in Germany, the chances of you being able to scale your campaigns on YouTube, very, very slim. Because the possibility of you getting your ads in front of a car dealership owner, someone who owns a car dealership in Germany, is going to be very hard with YouTube Ads. YouTube Ads is a scaling platform, meaning that it's a very broad, broad ads platform. You have to have a broad offer to make it really scalable.

Okay?

So with you start, okay, when you start your campaigns, you want to be very niche, okay? Because most people, they go broad first. But what we recommend is starting with remarketing lists. These are basically people that you can create audiences on based off the websites they're visiting. So for example, if you go into your ads account, go to tools and settings or audience Manager, you can click on this plus icon right here. Under data segments, you can create what's called website visitors. You can actually target people based on the pages they're visiting with your funnel, with your offer, or with any sort of page that you have on your website. These are people that already know, like and trust you. They're already familiar with your brand. It's low hanging fruit, which is why they're very much down here on the bottom of the scale.

Okay.

Because this is low hanging fruit and they're easier to remarket to and show your ads to and get conversions right away. Next is YouTube audiences. You can also go to Tools and Settings, go to audience Manager, click on the plus icon, and create an audience based off your YouTube channel or your client's YouTube channel. So for example, if I select my channel here, I can create audiences based on anyone who's viewed a video of mine in the last 30 days, 180 days, 540 days. I can create an audience based off people who viewed certain videos and select each of those videos if I have different topics that I'm talking about on my YouTube channel, for example. And then I can also target people based on subscribers to my channel, visited my channel page, anyone who's liked a video of mine. So YouTube audiences are still very, very powerful. Now the focus of this video is going to be custom segment audiences. These are going to be the most powerful for you right now with this new update, especially because a lot of you probably don't have remarketing list because you're running ads for the very first time. A lot of you probably don't have a big YouTube channel. That's totally fine. You're going to start with what's called custom segment audiences. And they are broken out by three different types of categories.

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So if I go to Tools and Settings, I go to audience Manager, I can go to this column right here called Custom segments. Inside my Google Ads account I can click on create a custom audience. And now this is what Google is promoting in their targeting, okay? For conversion campaigns. Think about it like this. Media buying is becoming more automated, okay? Media buying is becoming more automated, meaning the targeting is much, much more broad. Google is doing this on purpose. They want you to tell them at the very minimum who you're looking for and they'll go find it. Which means your creative is still the most important piece of your YouTube ads campaign. Without a very specific creative to a very specific person, you're going to get left behind. The emphasis now for you as an advertiser should be to create great YouTube ads and let Google find your audiences. But then you can actually be specific here by creating a custom segment audience and actually inputting keywords into these audiences. So here's the catch 22. You still need keywords to create custom segment audiences. So all the keyword research that we've been teaching you on how to do is still relevant because you need to give Google some inputs here and in order for them to find out who you're looking for. So there's three different types of custom segment audiences, okay? And let me go to targeting timeline here. The first one that's the most powerful and the most specific is custom segment search. These are what's called custom search campaigns.

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Custom search campaigns. And so you can actually click on this button right here inside of this window. And people who have searched for any of these terms on Google, if you look over the help icon, enter search terms your ideal customer is using on Google. Your ads will reach people who search for those and similar terms only on campaigns running on Google properties. This is really powerful if you have, you can actually click on here if you have ads already running and it'll show you different keywords that you should be targeting based on your conversion performance in the past. But here's what we recommend. We recommend you use at least 10 to 15 keywords inside of this type of custom segment campaign. Remember, this is custom search, okay? You want at least 10 to 15 keywords in here. This is based on Google's policies. They actually recommend this as well. At least 15. We found the sweet spot is 10 to 15 keywords. And here's the catch. You want to create a bunch of these, okay? Don't create one, test it and say, oh, it didn't work, Brian. I'm going to say, you're an idiot. You need to create much, much more audiences than just one and test them, okay? You can't rely on just one audience. A lot of people think that, oh, I'm going to test one audience. It didn't work. Like, dude, boo hoo man. Like you got to get creative here. Find different keywords, bunch them together, create 10 to 15 of them, put them in one audience, and then create 10 more of those. Now you have 10 custom search right audiences that you can now be testing with your YouTube ads. That's the first type of one. And again it's on the lower end of the start and scale triangle because this is still pretty niche. People that are actually searching for what you have to offer, they're raising their hand. So the next type of custom segment is interests.

Okay?

These are ones that actually right here you can click on people with any of these interests or purchase intentions. If you scroll over the help icon, enter keywords describing your ideals, customers, interests, or products and services. They are actively researching to buy a much broader type of audience here, right? Much broader, but it's a lot more scalable, which is why it's again on the, the higher end of the scale timeline on the YouTube ads targeting timeline we've made for you. So this one is actually really good, but you want to have at least 5 to 10 keywords in here. We found that 3 to 5 is really good as well. But for the sake of this example and Recommendation, I think 5 to 10 is a very safe recommendation for you. Okay, so 5 to 10 keywords, add those up in here. Create custom segment audiences with the interest. We call this custom affinity. Okay, Custom affinity. And so you want to make at least 10, 10 of these as well and start testing those next. And last but not least is people who've browsed similar websites to specific websites. You can actually, you see this here. Expand segment by also including people who browse websites similar to. So check this out. Enter website addresses URLs that your ideal customer might visit. Your ads will reach people who browse websites similar to the URLs you enter. And note, this doesn't mean your ads will show on those URLs, obviously. So Google saying, enter some websites for us, Brian, that you can let us know who you're looking for. We'll find more people just like the ones that are browsing those websites. So give me a bunch of websites. We recommend five to 10 websites in those types of custom segment audiences. Again, much broader because they're going to say these people kind of are similar interested to this website because browsing other websites that are similar. Let's go find and put Brian's ads in front of them or your ads in front of them the next time they're on YouTube or Google. Right? Those are custom segment audiences. This is what you should be focusing on here. Right here. Creating a bunch of custom segment audiences inside your audience manager. Go to tools and settings, go to audience manager. Go to custom segments. Click on this plus icon and start creating a bunch of these. We've given you the recommendations here. 10 to 15 keywords for custom search. 5 to 10 keywords for custom affinity. 5 to 10 websites for custom websites. Those are the audiences you want to start with. Now, once you have some winners in your campaigns, where you have a campaign that's profitable, then you want to add optimized targeting. Optimized targeting allows you to be able to expand that audience and easily find more people that are also interested in that similar type of content. So that's the next one on the scale and then we go up to in market, affinity, life events, demographics. Those are all very broad type of audiences. So with that said, your focus should still be on creating the best possible ads that you can and being as specific as possible in those ads. So your ads have the best chance of converting to cold traffic the broader you go on this scale timeline, okay? The Creative is still 80% of your success when it comes to YouTube ads. Again, media buying is becoming more automated. The focus for you needs to be on your creative and your strategy and meaning. The messaging of your ad has to be really good. The broad messaging of your offer has to be broad enough to really scale. And the focus is on the actual creative. The media buying is more automated. You're going to be entering these inputs into these custom segment audiences, telling Google who you want to find. But it's becoming more AI, okay? AI algorithmic audiences are now the new normal with YouTube ads. You have to adjust, you have to adapt or you will be left behind. Here's a quick tip. If you have keywords that are already working inside your Google Ads account right now, simply transfer those using the guidelines we've given you right here and create different types of custom segment audiences with those already proven keywords. That's what I would do. I would take all of my top performing keywords and I would group them together in various numbers of ways here and I would put them into custom segment audiences and test a bunch of these. Okay, so with that said, I hope this was helpful. Again, this is good thing. This means that a lot of advertisers who don't adapt to this or don't focus on the creative will get left behind. Which means a huge opportunity for us right here watching this video. Because we will know that now that YouTube ads are becoming more automated with the audiences, Google's being more broad with the targeting. We have to focus on the strategy, we have to focus on the creative. We have to become better marketers and everybody else who's relying on the old ways of targeting YouTube ads with placements will not be able to adapt. Just means we have to get better. That's the cool part. So I hope you enjoyed if you did and you want to learn exactly how to create a high converting YouTube ad step by step, then go ahead and watch this video right here. I give a full masterclass presentation showing you exactly how your perfect YouTube ads script should look from start to finish. The exact framework as well as a lot of other really cool advanced strategies. And you can watch it right there. I'll see you in that video. In this video, I'm going to give you everything from A to Z. And this is stuff that I've really never shared online before. So make sure to take out a pen, take out a paper, take some notes, because this will be a very tactical training.