The Ultimate Guide to DV360 Audiences: Targeting & Strategy

Display & Video 360 (DV360) offers among the strongest targeting capabilities in programmatic advertising, leveraging Google's vast first-party data, behavioral segments from Search/YouTube, offering custom affinity, and integrating third-party data.

These broad targeting capabilities help advertisers deliver more relevant ads, improve campaign performance, and maximize return on investment.

This guide explores DV360's targeting capabilities and provides insights on how advertisers can leverage these tools to maximize the impact of their programmatic campaigns.

Key Takeaways:

• Your own data from site visitors, CRM lists, and app users is the most powerful and reliable source for high-performing audiences in DV360.
• Leverage Google's vast data ecosystem with Affinity, In-Market, and Custom audiences to expand your reach and find new customers.
• While used with caution, third-party data can add specific demographic or behavioral layers not available elsewhere, though its role is changing.
• Advanced strategies involve layering multiple audiences for precision and excluding converted users to maximize efficiency and ROAS.
• True audience mastery requires a unified view of performance. Integrating DV360 data with your other marketing channels is critical for holistic optimization.

What Are DV360 Audiences? A Foundational Overview

Before diving into complex strategies, we must establish a clear foundation. 

A DV360 audience is a defined group of users segmented for advertising purposes. These users share specific characteristics, behaviors, or interests. The goal is to deliver highly relevant ad experiences to these specific groups. 

This approach increases engagement and drives conversions more effectively than generic advertising.

The Role of Audiences in Display & Video 360

DV360 acts as a central hub for audience management. It allows you to create audiences from various data sources. 

You can use your own first-party data. You can tap into Google's massive data pools. You can even access third-party data providers. 

Once created, these audiences can be targeted across a vast inventory of display, video, and audio ad placements. DV360 makes it possible to activate these powerful segments at scale.

How DV360 Collects and Organizes Audience Data

DV360 collects and organizes audience data through its Audience module, where all signals are unified into targetable segments. The platform pulls data from several key sources.

First-party data comes from Floodlight tags that track onsite actions such as product views, sign-ups, and purchases. When Google Analytics 360 is connected, additional behavioral data (sessions, engagement, and funnel activity) flows directly into DV360 for activation.

Advertisers can also upload hashed customer lists, allowing offline and CRM data to be matched and used for targeting or suppression. Google then enriches these inputs with its own intent and interest signals derived from Search, YouTube, and activity across the Google ecosystem.

Third-party data providers add further demographic and behavioral layers. DV360 processes all of these signals into clean audience segments that can be combined, excluded, or expanded to support precise targeting and optimization.

1. The Core of Your Strategy: First-Party Audiences

First-party data is information you collect directly from your audience. This includes website visitors, app users, and customers in your CRM. It is the most valuable and accurate data you own. 

In DV360, leveraging first-party audiences is the cornerstone of effective retargeting and customer retention strategies.

Why First-Party Data is Your Most Valuable Asset

First-party data is reliable because you own its collection method. It reflects direct engagement with your brand. This makes it highly relevant for personalization. Furthermore, as the industry moves toward a cookieless future, first-party data becomes even more critical. It provides a durable foundation for audience targeting that respects user privacy and consent.

This targeting is crucial for advertisers aiming to re-engage users who have already shown interest in their products or services.

Tag-Based Targeting (Floodlight)

Floodlight tags are essential for tracking user behavior across digital assets. 

By using Google’s Floodlight conversion tracking pixel, DV360 allows advertisers to create tag-based audiences. 

For example, a tag can be placed on a product page to create an audience segment of users who visited that page but didn’t complete a purchase. This segment can then be retargeted with specific offers or reminders, effectively moving these high-intent users further down the conversion funnel.

Tag-based targeting can be enhanced by integrating various conversion points across the user journey. By analyzing these data points, advertisers can segment audiences based on more refined actions, such as adding items to a cart or spending a specific amount of time on a page. This enables more personalized and effective retargeting efforts.

Activity-Based Targeting

DV360 enables the creation of first-party audiences based on campaign activity. 

For example, advertisers can create audiences that include users who have engaged with a specific ad or exclude users who have been overexposed to certain ads. This targeting helps optimize ad frequency, ensuring that users are exposed to the right amount of ad impressions without leading to ad fatigue.

An online retailer might use activity-based targeting to exclude users who have already completed a purchase, focusing instead on users who engaged with the brand but didn’t convert. By excluding users who have already taken action, advertisers can save on ad spend and focus on higher-value opportunities.

YouTube User List Targeting

DV360 allows advertisers to create remarketing lists specifically for YouTube. These lists can be based on users' past interactions with a brand’s videos, YouTube ads, or even its YouTube channel. 

For instance, a brand that runs video content on YouTube can retarget viewers who watched a product demo but didn’t visit the website afterward. This helps keep the brand top-of-mind while encouraging further engagement.

Remarketing on YouTube can be particularly effective for increasing conversions from users who are already familiar with the brand’s offerings.

Customer Match

Customer Match is a powerful tool within DV360 that enables advertisers to upload lists of customers in the form of email addresses or phone numbers. These lists can then be used to target users across YouTube and Google’s partners. 

For instance, a retailer can target lapsed customers who haven’t made a purchase in the last six months, offering them a special discount to re-engage them.

This targeting method is particularly effective for reactivating previous customers and fostering long-term loyalty. By personalizing ads based on past purchase behavior or engagement, advertisers can drive repeat business more effectively.

Google Analytics 360 Audience Targeting

By linking a Google Analytics 360 account with DV360, advertisers can share remarketing lists created from site or app behavior. 

This integration allows for targeting based on deeper behavioral insights, such as users who completed a specific sequence of actions on a site. For example, users who visited a pricing page but didn’t proceed to checkout can be targeted with ads highlighting special offers or features designed to reduce purchase friction.

This connection between DV360 and Google Analytics 360 enables more refined audience segmentation and targeting, enhancing the precision of digital campaigns and helping advertisers maximize the impact of their first-party data.

2. Expanding Your Reach with Google Audiences

This type of targeting draws from Google’s vast datasets, allowing for highly relevant audience segmentation that enhances campaign performance. 

Here’s a closer look at the key options available under Google Audiences.

Affinity Audiences

Affinity audiences in DV360 allow advertisers to target users based on their long-term interests, passions, and habits. Google categorizes users who regularly engage with specific types of content, making them ideal candidates for awareness campaigns. 

Example of available affinity audiences in Display & Video 360:

• Banking & Finance » Avid Investors
• Food & Dining » Frequently Dines Out
• Lifestyles & Hobbies » Pet Lovers » Cat Lovers
• Lifestyles & Hobbies » Shutterbugs
• Media & Entertainment » Music Lovers » Classical Music Enthusiasts
• News & Politics » Avid News Readers » Avid Local News Readers
• Sports & Fitness » Sports Fans » Cycling Enthusiasts
• Vehicles & Transportation » Transportation Modes » Public Transit Users

Affinity audience segments can be broad, which makes them well-suited for upper-funnel strategies. This targeting helps build brand awareness and recognition among users who are more likely to engage with relevant content.

In-Market Audiences

In-market audiences are users who are actively researching or considering purchasing a particular product or service. 

Google identifies these users based on their recent online behavior, such as search activity, content consumption, and interactions with ads. This targeting is particularly effective for conversion-focused campaigns since these users are closer to making a purchasing decision.

Custom Audiences

Custom audiences in DV360 allow advertisers to define their own audience segments by entering specific keywords, URLs, and apps related to their products or services. The system then identifies users who are actively searching for or engaging with content that matches those inputs. 

This flexibility is particularly useful for advertisers with niche markets or specific campaign goals.

Custom audiences can also adapt to specific campaign goals, whether the objective is reach, consideration, or performance. This adaptability makes custom audiences a valuable asset for advertisers looking to fine-tune their targeting strategy.

Life Events

Life events targeting in DV360 allows advertisers to reach users who are undergoing significant life milestones, such as moving, graduating, getting married, or having a baby. 

Google tracks these major life events based on user behavior and interactions across its platforms. This targeting is particularly effective for brands that offer products or services closely tied to these milestones.

Life events targeting helps advertisers reach audiences at key moments when they are more likely to make significant purchasing decisions, making it a valuable addition to any campaign strategy.

Demographics Targeting

Demographics targeting in DV360 enables advertisers to reach audiences based on specific characteristics such as age, gender, parental status, and household income. 

These demographic segments are essential for ensuring that campaigns are delivered to users who align with the brand’s target market.

Demographic targeting ensures that ads are shown to users who are most likely to be interested in the product or service, reducing wasted ad spend and improving campaign efficiency.

First-Party vs. Third-Party Data: A Strategic Comparison

Understanding the differences between data types is crucial for building an effective DV360 audience strategy. Each has unique strengths and weaknesses that make them suitable for different campaign goals. 

3. Contextual Targeting: Aligning Ads with Content

Unlike audience targeting, which focuses on user behaviors and profiles, contextual targeting places ads on specific types of content, ensuring that the ad message complements the surrounding environment.

Keyword Targeting

Keyword targeting enables advertisers to align ads with content that matches specific keywords. 

DV360's advanced keyword targeting uses Google’s search technology to ensure that ads appear on pages where the content closely aligns with the selected keywords.

Keyword targeting is beneficial for increasing relevance, as users are more likely to engage with ads that match the content they are currently consuming. 

Category Targeting

Category targeting in DV360 allows advertisers to place their ads on content grouped into specific categories. 

Example of broad category targeting options:

• /Arts & Entertainment
• /Autos & Vehicles
• /Beauty & Fitness
• /Books & Literature
• /Business & Industrial
• /Computers & Electronics
• /Finance
• /Food & Drink
• /Games
• /Health

This method uses Google’s vast categorization of online content to align ads with relevant topics. By placing ads in a relevant category, advertisers can enhance the context in which users view their ads, leading to better engagement.

Category targeting is particularly useful for broader awareness campaigns where the goal is to reach a large audience with a general interest in a specific topic. It provides a scalable way to align ads with content that fits the brand's messaging.

Site Targeting

Site targeting allows advertisers to select specific websites or domains where their ads will appear. This ensures that ads are displayed in digital environments that align closely with the brand’s identity or target audience. 

For instance, an advertiser for luxury goods might choose to place ads on premium lifestyle websites that attract an affluent audience.

Site targeting gives advertisers control over the digital real estate their ads occupy, ensuring that the brand message is delivered in a context that reflects its values and positioning. This type of targeting is particularly effective for brands that want to maintain a high level of control over their ad placements, ensuring brand safety and relevance.

By choosing specific sites, advertisers can also target niche audiences more effectively. For example, an advertiser for outdoor gear might choose to display ads on well-known hiking or camping websites, reaching a highly engaged and relevant audience.

URL Targeting

URL targeting within DV360 is an extension of site targeting, allowing advertisers to focus on specific URLs within a broader domain. This is useful for targeting highly specific content within larger websites. 

For example, a fitness brand might target URLs on a health website that specifically discuss workout plans or nutritional advice.

URL targeting offers even greater precision by focusing on the exact pages where relevant content is hosted. This ensures that ads appear next to the most relevant and high-value content, further enhancing user engagement. It’s especially useful for advertisers with specific product lines or services that need to be matched with very targeted content.

Contextual Signals and Machine Learning

DV360 also leverages Google’s machine learning algorithms to enhance contextual targeting. 

These algorithms analyze content across the web and match it with ads in real time, ensuring that the most relevant ads are shown to users based on the context of the page they are viewing. This dynamic matching improves the accuracy and effectiveness of contextual targeting by ensuring that ads are always aligned with the most relevant content available.

4. Engagement-Based or Behavioral Targeting

While it doesn't fit into traditional categories like contextual or demographic targeting, it taps into user behavior and engagement patterns, making it particularly effective for driving more meaningful interactions and higher ad completion rates.

User-Rewarded Content Targeting

User-rewarded content targeting in DV360 allows advertisers to serve ads within environments where users voluntarily engage with them in exchange for rewards, such as in-app bonuses, extra game lives, or premium content access. 

The opt-in nature of these ads creates a positive user experience, as users are rewarded for their time, and advertisers benefit from more engaged audiences who are more likely to interact with the brand. 

This type of targeting is particularly valuable for gaming apps and mobile environments, where user-rewarded ads can drive higher completion rates and brand recall.

App Engagement Targeting

App engagement targeting in DV360 allows advertisers to reach users who have previously installed or interacted with a mobile app, making it a powerful tool for re-engaging existing users. This targeting method aims to drive deeper engagement, such as encouraging in-app purchases, feature usage, or app upgrades.

Advertisers can segment audiences based on specific in-app behaviors, such as the number of sessions, purchases made, or time spent within the app, allowing for highly personalized and relevant messaging. 

This targeting is particularly effective for retaining users and increasing their lifetime value by prompting actions that contribute to deeper app usage. For example, a gaming app might use app engagement targeting to promote new levels or features to users who have already completed a certain portion of the game.

5. Third-Party Audiences: Expanding Reach Through External Data

Access to Specialized Data

DV360’s integration with third-party data providers offers a vast array of targeting options, which include demographic attributes such as age, gender, income level, and behavioral data that reflect users' online activities and purchasing behaviors.

By working with trusted data providers, advertisers can access curated data segments that cover specific industries, interest groups, or behaviors. This specialized data allows for the creation of more granular audience segments, improving the relevance of ad campaigns and reducing waste.

Behavioral Targeting

Behavioral targeting leverages data on users' online actions, such as search history, website visits, and content consumption patterns, to build audience segments. For example, a technology brand looking to promote a new smartphone can use third-party data to target users who frequently browse tech-related websites or who have recently searched for mobile phone reviews.

This form of targeting is highly effective for reaching users who may not be actively searching for a product at the moment but have demonstrated behavior that indicates potential interest. By identifying these behavioral signals, advertisers can deliver ads that resonate with users' current or past interests, increasing the likelihood of engagement.

Demographic Targeting with Third-Party Data

Third-party data providers often enhance demographic targeting capabilities by offering additional attributes that go beyond basic demographics. Third-party data allows advertisers to pinpoint these audiences more accurately than relying solely on first-party or in-platform data.

By layering on additional demographic details, advertisers can ensure that their campaigns reach the most relevant segments of the population. This results in more efficient use of advertising spend, as ads are more likely to be seen by users who fit the ideal customer profile.

Integration with Data Management Platforms (DMPs)

DV360's ability to integrate with DMPs allows for the importation of third-party audience segments directly into the platform. 

Advertisers can sync data from their preferred DMP to create audience segments that align with their campaign objectives. This integration makes it possible to create highly detailed and refined audience segments, combining first-party data with external insights. The result is a more sophisticated targeting strategy that reaches the right users with the right message, at the right time.

Advanced Features for Granular Control

DV360 offers a range of advanced features that allow advertisers to achieve more precise control over their targeting strategies. 

By using these features, advertisers can optimize performance and deliver ads to the most relevant audiences in the most effective contexts.

Combined Audiences

One of the most powerful advanced features in DV360 is the ability to create combined audiences. This feature allows advertisers to merge different audience types, such as first-party data, Google Audiences, and third-party data, into a single, refined segment.

By blending various data sources, combined audiences offer a more granular approach to targeting, ensuring that campaigns are both broad enough to reach new users and specific enough to maintain relevance. This strategy is particularly effective for scaling campaigns without compromising on precision.

Proximity Targeting

Proximity targeting in DV360 allows advertisers to deliver ads based on a user’s geographic location, focusing on specific areas such as postal codes, regions, or even points of interest (POIs). 

This feature is particularly useful for local businesses or campaigns that require a regional focus.

Proximity targeting can be further refined to target users near specific business chains, individual stores, or even competitors.

For example, a fitness brand might target users who are near a competitor's gym, offering them a promotional discount to encourage them to switch. This level of geographic precision enhances the relevance of ads and drives foot traffic to physical locations.

Day & Time Targeting

Day and time targeting in DV360 allows advertisers to schedule ads to run at specific times of the day or on particular days of the week. This feature ensures that ads are shown when the target audience is most likely to be receptive, maximizing the effectiveness of the campaign. 

For example, a B2B software company might choose to run ads during business hours when decision-makers are more likely to be researching products and solutions.

This feature also enables advertisers to adjust their bids based on the time of day. 

For instance, an e-commerce retailer may choose to increase bids during peak shopping hours, such as lunchtime or in the evenings, when users are more likely to make purchases. By optimizing ad delivery around user behavior patterns, advertisers can improve campaign performance and drive higher conversion rates.

Frequency Capping

Frequency capping in DV360 allows advertisers to control the number of times a user is exposed to the same ad within a specific time frame. 

This feature helps prevent ad fatigue, where users become annoyed by seeing the same ad too often, which can lead to diminishing returns. For example, an advertiser promoting an upcoming event might cap ad impressions to ensure users see the message a limited number of times, creating urgency without oversaturating the audience.

By setting appropriate frequency caps, advertisers can maintain user engagement and maximize the impact of their campaigns. It also allows for better budget allocation, as ads are more evenly distributed across the target audience rather than over-delivering to the same users.

Audience Exclusions

Audience exclusions are another advanced feature in DV360 that allows advertisers to refine their targeting strategies by excluding specific user groups from their campaigns. 

This feature is useful for ensuring that ads are not shown to users who are unlikely to convert or who have already taken the desired action.

By excluding irrelevant audiences, advertisers can improve the efficiency of their campaigns and reduce wasted ad spend. This feature also helps to ensure that the right message reaches the right people at the right time, enhancing overall campaign performance.

Measuring Audience Performance and ROI

It's not enough to simply activate audiences; you must rigorously measure their performance and optimize based on the results. DV360 offers powerful reporting tools, but their insights are magnified when combined with a holistic analytics approach.

Key Metrics for Evaluating Audience Success

Beyond standard metrics like CTR and CPC, focus on metrics that align with your business goals. For audience performance, key indicators include:

• Conversion Rate: Which audiences are most likely to convert?
• Cost Per Acquisition (CPA): Which audiences deliver conversions most cost-effectively?
• Return on Ad Spend (ROAS): Which audiences generate the most revenue relative to their cost?
• View-Through Conversions (VTCs): How many users convert after seeing an ad, even if they didn't click?

Attributing Conversions to the Right Audiences

A customer may interact with multiple ads and audiences before converting. Understanding which touchpoints deserve credit is the challenge of attribution. It's crucial to move beyond last-click attribution, which often overvalues lower-funnel activities. Exploring different marketing attribution models can reveal the true influence of your upper-funnel audience targeting efforts.

Visualizing Performance with KPI Dashboards

Raw data tables can be overwhelming. Visualizing your audience performance data in KPI dashboards makes it easy to spot trends, identify top-performing segments, and share insights with stakeholders. A well-designed dashboard can compare the performance of different audience types (e.g., First-Party vs. In-Market) side-by-side, enabling faster, more informed optimization decisions.

Automating Audience Insights and Reporting

Analyzing dozens of DV360 audience segments can quickly become overwhelming. Each audience has unique performance patterns, bid dynamics, and creative interactions. Pulling these insights manually, export by export, line item by line item, creates delays and introduces inconsistencies.

Reporting automation solves this by continuously collecting, cleaning, and organizing data from DV360. Performance metrics update automatically, ensuring dashboards always reflect the latest impressions, spend, reach, conversions, and audience-level trends. This reduces reliance on spreadsheet workflows and enables analysts to focus on interpretation instead of extraction.

A platform like Improvado provides the infrastructure behind automated DV360 analytics. It handles ingestion, transformation, and standardization at enterprise scale, making DV360 audience insights easier to interpret and compare across channels.

Improvado automates the full data pipeline:

• Data extraction from DV360, Google Marketing Platform, and 500+ additional marketing sources
• Normalization and metric standardization across campaigns, audience segments, geographies, and creative types
• Entity mapping to unify DV360 data with CRM, attribution, and revenue systems
• Schema generation that transforms DV360’s complex structure into clean, analysis-ready tables
• Centralized storage in your warehouse of choice (BigQuery, Snowflake, Redshift, Databricks)
• Automated dashboards in Looker, Tableau, Power BI, or within Improvado’s own interface
• AI-powered analysis through Improvado’s AI Agent, which can generate insights, summaries, and trend explanations on demand
• Automated metric pacing and campaign set up monitoring to catch any performance or targeting issues early one. 

With this automated foundation, teams can:

• Track audience-level performance daily or hourly
• Compare DV360 audiences to Meta, Amazon, or TikTok equivalents
• Evaluate reach and frequency across segments
• Identify underperforming audiences early
• Build consistent cross-channel rollups for reporting and attribution

Improvado transforms DV360 reporting from a manual, reactive process into a unified, automated system that supports faster decisions and deeper audience insights.

Conclusion 

To use DV360 effectively, teams must understand how audiences behave, how segments perform across channels, and how targeting decisions influence downstream revenue. Data quality and visibility are what transform DV360 from an ad platform into a strategic growth engine.

Improvado provides the data foundation needed to make that possible. By automating ingestion from DV360 and every other marketing and revenue source, it creates a unified, standardized dataset that eliminates manual reporting and fragmented insights. 

This allows teams to compare DV360 audiences against performance in Meta, YouTube, Amazon, and other channels, evaluate true ROI, and optimize targeting with confidence. With clean, consistent data flowing into dashboards and AI-powered insights, marketers can fully leverage DV360’s targeting ecosystem.

If you want to make better, data-driven decisions in DV360 and build a unified view of performance, request a demo of Improvado.