Unlike traditional targeting, audience signals don't restrict who sees your ads. They tell Performance Max where to start looking, and Google expands beyond them when it finds people likely to convert. The strongest signals are your own data — Customer Match lists of past buyers and website remarketing lists — plus custom segments built from the searches and websites your customers use.
Good signals shorten the learning period and steer early spend toward the right people; weak or generic ones waste the first weeks on broad exploration. Because Google treats them as a starting point, signals work best alongside accurate conversion goals that define what a valuable customer actually is.
Example
A B2B software company adds its customer list and a custom segment of people searching for competitor products as audience signals for a new Performance Max campaign.
How Sloss Digital uses it
We seed audience signals with first-party customer data and high-intent custom segments, so Performance Max learns from real buyers instead of guessing.