Google Updates Political Ad Policy for 2020

Google has updated its political ad policy to change the targeting options available for political ads.

Google Political Ad Targeting Changes for 2020

Google is limiting how political ads can use audience targeting to reach people.

While we’ve never offered granular microtargeting of election ads, we believe there’s more we can do to further promote increased visibility of election ads. That’s why we’re limiting election ads audience targeting to the following general categories: age, gender, and general location (postal code level). 

Previously political advertisers could target users by various audience segments like local news readers, avid political news readers, or custom audiences to target people by their interests and passions.

How Political Advertisers Can target on google

Political advertisers can still use the Google Ad Network to target voters.

Political advertisers can, of course, continue to do contextual targeting, such as serving ads to people reading or watching a story about, say, the economy. This will align our approach to election ads with long-established practices in media such as TV, radio, and print…

Contextual targeting can be used to target articles with keywords relevant to their campaigns like particular issues and other candidates.