Affinity audiences are Google Ads audience groups built from people's long term interests and habits, such as technology fans or business news readers.
An affinity audience groups people by what they are interested in over months and years, not by what they are shopping for right now. Google builds these groups from browsing history, YouTube viewing and app use.
Think of it as describing a personality rather than an intention. Business professionals is an affinity audience. People researching CRM software this week is not.
[table]
Audience type | What it is based on | Buying intent | B2B use
Affinity | Long term interests and habits | Low | Broad awareness only
In-market | Active shopping behaviour right now | High | Much better fit
Custom segments | Keywords, URLs and apps you supply | Medium to high | The best of the three
Customer Match | Your own uploaded customer list | Highest | Strongest by far
Remarketing | People who visited your site | High | Strong
[/table]
Read down the intent column. Affinity sits at the bottom. That is the honest position, and it should shape how much budget it gets.
They are built for consumer brands. A trainer company wants people interested in running. That works well.
B2B is harder. Google has no affinity audience called a VP of Engineering at a Series B software company. The closest options are broad groups like Technophiles or Business Professionals, and those contain millions of people who will never buy software for their company. Reaching people by job role and company size is what LinkedIn Ads exists for.
So the honest answer is that affinity audiences are a weak targeting tool on their own in B2B. They become useful in one specific way: as a layer on top of something tighter. Take a customer list or a website remarketing audience, then use affinity to narrow it further. Narrowing works. Targeting affinity alone does not.
Two mistakes.
Using it as the only targeting on a Display campaign. Someone picks Business Professionals, sets a budget, and lets it run. The audience is enormous. The ads reach students, retirees and people who once read a finance article. The clicks are cheap and none of them matter.
Confusing it with in-market. The two sit next to each other in the interface and the names sound similar. In-market means someone is actively researching a purchase now. Affinity means they have a general interest. If you only remember one difference, remember that one.
Use affinity to narrow something tighter, never as the audience itself.
The order that works is simple. Start with your best audience. That is usually a Customer Match list of target accounts, or people who visited your pricing page. Then, if that audience is too large to spend efficiently against, add an affinity layer to cut it down.
If you have budget for awareness work and want to test affinity on its own, treat it as an experiment with a small budget and a clear stop date. Judge it on whether branded search volume moves, not on clicks.
For most Seed to Series B accounts, there are better places for that money. Custom segments built from competitor URLs and category keywords will reach a far more relevant group for the same spend, and a proper firmographic audience will beat both.
A group of people defined by long term interests and habits, such as technology enthusiasts or business news readers. Google builds them from browsing history, YouTube viewing and app usage over months.
Affinity is about lasting interests. In-market is about active shopping right now. Someone in an in-market audience is researching a purchase today, which makes in-market far more useful for B2B campaigns.
Not on their own. The available groups are too broad, and none of them describe a job role or a company size. They work better as a narrowing layer on top of a customer list or a remarketing audience.
Google offers custom segments, where you supply keywords, competitor URLs and apps. These behave more like affinity and in-market combined, and they are a much better fit for B2B than the standard affinity list.
Customer Match is strongest, since it uses your own list of target accounts. After that, website remarketing and custom segments built from competitor URLs. Affinity sits last on that list for most B2B accounts.
ScalixAI is a performance-driven Google Ads agency specializing in helping high-growth, AI-first companies scale with predictable, profitable customer acquisition. Founded by an ex-Googler with 9 years of insider advertising experience, we manage the entire Google Ads lifecycle—from campaign strategy and account setup to conversion tracking, analytics, and ongoing optimization. Our data-centric, AI-powered approach ensures you know exactly which campaigns are working, why they’re working, and what to do next to outpace your competitors.ScalixAI is a performance-driven Google Ads agency specializing in helping high-growth, AI-first companies scale with predictable, profitable customer acquisition. Founded by an ex-Googler with 9 years of insider advertising experience, we manage the entire Google Ads lifecycle—from campaign strategy and account setup to conversion tracking, analytics, and ongoing optimization.
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