Optimised targeting is a Google Ads setting that lets a campaign show ads to people outside the audiences you selected, whenever Google predicts they are likely to convert. The audience segments you choose become a starting point for the system rather than a fence around it.
How optimised targeting works
At the time of writing (October 2026), optimised targeting is mainly found in Display campaigns and Demand Gen campaigns, and it is usually switched on by default when you add audience segments. You can turn it off at ad group level.
Google looks at the segments you added, your landing page, your ad text and images, any keywords you supplied and, most importantly, the people who have already converted. From that it builds a picture of who is likely to convert next and bids on them, whether or not they belong to your chosen segments. If your chosen segments perform worse than the people it finds elsewhere, it moves spend away from them.
Some limits still hold. Location and language settings apply, as do exclusions you set. Google’s help pages list exactly which other settings optimised targeting can look past, and that list has changed before, so read it before relying on a particular setting to hold.
The idea is similar to an audience signal in Performance Max. The difference is that in Performance Max the expansion is built in and cannot be switched off, while in Display and Demand Gen you choose.
Why it matters
The setting can be helpful or costly, and which one depends almost entirely on how good your conversion data is. With accurate conversion tracking and enough conversions to learn from, it can find buyers you would never have thought to describe. A garden furniture retailer targeting “home and garden enthusiasts” may find that new homeowners and people browsing outdoor heating convert just as well.
With weak data, it does the opposite. If the only conversion is a page view, or if form submissions include a lot of spam, optimised targeting will happily find more people who produce those cheap, worthless actions. For a UK B2B firm trying to reach finance directors, that can mean a Display budget spread thinly across mobile app users who will never buy.
Common mistakes
- Not realising it is on by default, then wondering why spend has drifted away from the segments you picked.
- Running it with no conversion tracking or with a low-value conversion such as a page view, so it optimises towards the wrong people.
- Reading segment reports as the full picture. Once the setting is on, a large share of impressions may come from outside your chosen segments.
- Leaving it on in remarketing ad groups, where the whole point is a closed list of past visitors or customers.
How to act on it
Decide ad group by ad group. For prospecting campaigns with reliable conversions, leave it on and judge results on cost per conversion and on lead quality in your CRM, not on click-through rate. For remarketing and customer list campaigns, switch it off. Where you are unsure, run a test: one ad group with the setting on and one with it off, over long enough to gather a meaningful number of conversions.
Before any of that, check that the conversions in the account are the ones that matter to the business. Settings like this are part of the monthly review in my PPC management service.