Unable To Use a Custom Intent Audience In YouTube For Action Ads? Here's How To Fix

If you saw the above error in Google Ads Editor while trying to associate a Custom Intent audience with a YouTube For Actions Ads campaign, you’d be stumped. Isn’t the whole point of custom intent audiences is that you get to use it for mid-funnel audiences in campaign types such as YT For Action Ads…?

The reason for this error is all down to one setting in Audience Manager that defines everything:

Custom Intent: Google Search Terms creates an audience made of users who are searching for the keywords that you enter here.

Custom Intent: In-market keywords is made up of custom in-market categories based on the keywords you define. Standard in-market categories are what have been traditionally used in display campaigns.

When you try to associate a Custom Intent: In-market keywords based audience with a YouTube For Action Ads campaign, there’s a clash in terms on audience usage…which is what causes the error seen in Google Ads Editor.

If you want to test it out, create two custom intent audiences:

Audience 1 with Google search keyword and Audience 2 with In-market keyword.

Audience #1

Audience #2

Try applying Audience #2 to a YT For Action Ads campaign, it won’t work. Now try applying Audience #1 to the same campaign.

Success! The Custom Intent - Google Search KW audience went through.

and that’s it. I faced this error today and thought of creating this blog post, as it might help others who might get stuck with this. If you found it useful, do share it with others.

Thanks for reading.