Targeting your audience

Choose who sees your campaign - by geography, demographics, device, and language.

Targeting limits the audience for your campaign. Each filter narrows the pool. The more restrictive your filters, the smaller (and usually higher-intent) the audience.

Geography

Countries

Pick one or more countries. Most US-focused advertisers select just United States. International advertisers can pick a handful of relevant markets.

US states

Optional. Leave it empty to target all 50 states + DC. Useful for localized offers - for example an auto-insurance campaign that's only valid in California, Texas, and Florida.

Demographics

Age range

Inclusive on both ends. The default range is 18-99 (essentially all adults). Tighten this if your offer is age-sensitive (e.g. 25-54 for a retirement-planning service).

Gender

• Male
• Female
• Other / unknown - anyone who declined to specify, or whose gender wasn't captured

You must pick at least one. Most campaigns leave all three checked unless the offer is gender-specific.

Devices

Limit the device types your ad will serve on:

• Desktop
• Mobile (smartphones)
• Tablet

If your landing page isn't mobile-optimized, consider unchecking Mobile and Tablet.

Languages

Pick the user-interface languages you want to reach. Most US campaigns just select English. For markets like Quebec, Spain, or LATAM you might add the local language.

Schedule (dayparting)

By default a campaign runs around the clock. The Schedule grid on the campaign edit page lets you pick exactly which hours of which days it may run - 168 cells, one per hour of the week. Click a cell to toggle it, or click and drag to paint a range. Clicking a day name toggles that whole day; clicking an hour number toggles that hour across every day.

There are shortcuts for the common patterns: 24/7, Business hours (Mon-Fri, 9am-5pm), Weekends, and Clear.

Which clock does it use?

Your account timezone, set under Settings. If you set that to America/New_York and schedule 9am-5pm, your campaign runs 9am-5pm Eastern - not UTC, and not the visitor's local time. A visitor in Los Angeles browsing at 8am Pacific is inside an Eastern 9-5 window, because the window is about your clock, not theirs.

Daylight saving is handled for you. A 9am-5pm schedule stays 9am-5pm across the spring and autumn changeovers.

Things worth knowing

• Hours are whole hours. A cell covers the full hour, so 9am-5pm means from 9:00:00 up to 16:59:59.
• Selecting every cell is identical to selecting none - both mean "run any time".
• Deselecting every cell means the campaign never serves. The editor warns you when a schedule is empty.
• A schedule doesn't change your budget. It concentrates the same daily budget into fewer hours, so you may spend it faster within the window.
• Pausing by schedule is not the same as pausing the campaign - reporting still shows the campaign as active, just with no delivery outside its hours.

How restrictive should I be?

Starting out: stay broad. Target your whole country, all genders, ages 18-65, all devices. Let the campaign run for a few days and look at where conversions are coming from.

Optimizing: use Reports (group by day or by campaign) to spot patterns. If you notice mobile traffic is converting at half the rate of desktop, consider unchecking mobile or creating a mobile-specific campaign.

Can I change targeting after launch?

Yes. From the campaign detail page click Edit. All targeting fields are editable, including the schedule. Changes take effect immediately - the next ad request already uses them, and there's nothing to relaunch.