What are Third-Party Audiences?
Third-party audiences enhance targeting precision and campaign effectiveness by reaching specific customer segments outside of GroundTruth scope of location, offline, and predictive behavior. By leveraging these advanced external data layers, advertisers can scale their reach across all channels.
Ads Manager categorizes these third-party data options into two distinct catalogs: Predictive Audiences (ZeroToOne.AI) and Premium Audiences (Datonics). This guide outlines the core use case of each.
Predictive AI Audiences use continuously refreshed behavioral signals from ZeroToOne.AI to identify consumers who are most likely to take action before a purchase or visit occurs. Unlike historical retargeting or static lookalike modeling, these machine-learning segments isolate users actively moving toward a future decision.
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Best Used For:
- Capturing immediate demand based on dynamic consumer decision timelines
- Influencing new, high-intent consumers at the upper- and mid-funnel stages
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How it Works: The underlying AI models analyze large-scale external behavioral data (including location visitation, consumer interests, transaction patterns, digital engagement, and demographic signals) to calculate the statistical probability of future actions.
- GroundTruth features 40+ curated predictive audiences across multiple high-impact verticals in Ads Manager. Each audience features an automated “Prediction Window” tailored to that specific vertical’s unique conversion cycle.
Learn more in: Predictive AI Audiences (from ZeroToOne.AI)
Premium Audiences are powered by Datonics, an external, third-party audience data provider integrated directly into Ads Manager. These segments allow advertisers to extend their reach when standard first-party location options do not fully cover the campaign's specific demographic or intent requirements.
- Best Used For: Reaching highly niche users based on verified digital signals (e.g., specific search history, life-stage milestones, B2B profiles, political intent, or granular purchase intent).
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How it Works: Datonics compiles multi-source data signals to build distinct segments spanning household characteristics, career fields, and deep consumer interests.
- GroundTruth has ingested 300+ of these audience segments directly into the Ads Manager library for turnkey activation.
IMPORTANT NOTE ⚠️: Using Datonics Premium Audiences incurs a flat +$1.50 CPM premium surcharge per ad group, regardless of how many Datonics segments you select inside that single ad group. Because Ads Manager does not automatically inject this into your base bid, you must manually add this surcharge to your bid price on the Budget & Schedule page.
Example: With the minimum CPM for Mobile Display is $3.50, your input bid price must be at least $5.00 ($3.50 + $1.50) to clear the system minimum..
Learn more in: Premium Audience (Datonics)
Guidelines & Best Practices
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Keep premium audiences separate: To maximize bid pricing accuracy, prevent delivery drops and ensure accurate performance, do NOT mix premium audiences and first-party audience types within the same ad group.
- Place Premium (Datonics) segments in their own dedicated ad group.
- Avoid over-filtering predictive audiences: Predictive AI audiences are already heavily optimized by external machine-learning models. Applying excessive filter constraints within Ads Manager may over-restrict your audience scale and negatively impact your pacing.
Frequently Asked Questions
- Are these third-party audiences supported across all channels? Yes. Both Predictive and Premium audiences can be activated across Mobile, Desktop, and CTV/OTT. Audio channel support is currently in development.
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How do I access these audience catalogs in Ads Manager?
- When building a campaign, create a Target by Audience ad group.
- Click “Browse Audience Library” in the audience search bar
- Expand Predictive Audiences or Premium Audiences to view available segments.
- Will more segments be added to these audience catalogs in the future? Yes. These initial 40 Predictive and 300+ Premium segments are just part of the initial launch. We are actively expanding and will continue to build and add more audience segments directly into Ads Manager.
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