Affinity, in-market, custom segments, and remarketing on the Display Network — matching the right audience type to the right stage of the funnel.
Audience targeting is where Display campaigns either become powerful or become expensive mistakes. Without the right audience layer, you're showing ads to anyone who happens to be on a relevant website — which sounds reasonable until you see the CPA. I've rebuilt Display campaigns for clients that were targeting by topic alone with zero audience refinement, and the difference after adding proper audience targeting was dramatic. The Display exam tests this heavily because audience selection is the primary lever that separates wasted impressions from meaningful reach.
This distinction comes up in almost every Display exam and is one of the most practically important audience decisions you'll make.
Correct answer: B. Affinity audiences reflect long-term interests and lifestyle patterns; In-market audiences identify users who are actively researching or comparing products for a near-term purchase
Affinity audiences are broad — "Cooking Enthusiasts" or "Fitness Buffs" — and reflect who someone is over time. In-market audiences are narrower and timelier — someone actively comparing laptops or looking at holiday packages right now. For brand awareness campaigns I use affinity. For conversion-focused Display campaigns I use in-market. Layering both together with an AND condition is a technique I use to reach people who have the right long-term profile AND are actively in-market — a smaller but significantly higher-intent audience.
Custom Segments are one of the more powerful and underused targeting options — the exam increasingly tests them.
Correct answer: B. An audience you define by entering keywords, URLs, or apps that your ideal customer searches for or uses, allowing Google to find users with matching intent
Custom Segments let you describe your audience based on what they search for and what sites they visit — essentially building an intent-based audience from scratch rather than relying on Google's predefined categories. For B2B clients where there's no matching in-market segment, I build custom segments using competitor URLs and industry-specific search terms. It's one of the most effective ways to reach niche professional audiences on Display who wouldn't be captured by standard affinity or in-market buckets.
Remarketing is the highest-intent Display audience available — this scenario is a staple exam question.
Correct answer: C. Remarketing list — Users who visited specific product pages but did not convert
Remarketing to non-converting product page visitors is the single most effective Display audience in ecommerce. These users have already demonstrated purchase intent — they just didn't complete the action. A tailored ad that reminds them of what they viewed, potentially with an incentive, consistently outperforms any cold audience targeting. I always set up separate remarketing lists for homepage visitors, product page visitors, cart abandoners, and past purchasers — each with different ad messaging and bid multipliers reflecting their proximity to conversion.
Optimised Targeting is a newer feature that the exam now includes — it's important to understand what it actually does to your targeting.
Correct answer: B. It allows Google to expand targeting beyond your selected audiences to find additional users likely to convert, based on your campaign's conversion data
Optimised Targeting is Google's way of finding users who look similar to your existing converters, even if they don't fall within your manually defined audience segments. When it works well, it can meaningfully expand reach while maintaining efficiency. I enable it selectively — it's most useful on conversion-optimised campaigns with solid conversion history, and I always monitor the audience insights report to see where Google is actually expanding to and whether those users are genuinely converting.
This tests your knowledge of how Google finds new users who resemble your best existing customers.
Correct answer: C. Similar Segments (formerly Similar Audiences)
Similar Segments use your existing remarketing or Customer Match lists as a seed — Google then identifies new users who share behavioural and interest patterns with the people on those lists. It's prospecting using your best customers as the template. I use Similar Segments as a core prospecting layer in Display campaigns for clients who have enough conversion data to make the seed list meaningful. The quality of the similar audience is directly tied to the quality and size of the original list — a remarketing list of past purchasers produces far better similar segments than a generic all-site-visitors list.
Are your Display campaigns running with broad topic targeting and no audience layer? That's the most common reason Display budgets get wasted. Let me show you what proper audience architecture looks like.
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