Audience targeting ensures your ads are being seen by your selected audience within the locations you defined. Roku Ads Manager provides flexible tools to help advertisers define and refine their target audiences. Whether you're exploring audience options or running campaigns, you have control over targeting parameters such as demographics and preferences to optimize your reach.
If you don't want to create an audience, Roku will automatically optimize your audience based on your advertising objective and any other parameters you've set
Getting started
While creating your campaign, go to the Audience section and select the Edit button to access the 4 audience-targeting options. Experiment the impact to household reach with various targeting options here to refine your audience setup using Forecaster before officially launching the campaign.
Roku Ads Manager allows you to try out targeting options before you officially launch your campaign. By creating a campaign in the platform, you can:
Explore all available audience targeting options.
Adjust and refine parameters such as demographics, budget, and scheduling.
Save your setup and proceed whenever you are ready to launch. This feature ensures advertisers can confidently plan campaigns with well-defined targeting strategies in place.
Note: Limiting your audience may impact performance. Unless you know who your audience is for sure, we recommend letting the system optimize
You'll make your audience selections here:
After you've made selections
On your Campaign page, your selections will appear on the Audience panel
How audiences from different categories work together:
Your selections are automatically saved and applied to your campaign.
AND Logic Across Different Target Groups: When selecting criteria from different groups (e.g., gender and age), the system targets users who meet all specified conditions. For example, targeting "female" and "age group 18–24" will restrict the audience to women aged 18–24.
OR Logic Within the Same Target Group: When selecting multiple criteria within a single group (e.g., age groups), the system targets users who meet any one of the conditions. For example, selecting "age group 18–24" and "age group 25–34" will expand the audience to include users from both groups.
If the audience you chose isn’t hitting the target you’d like, you can change your audience selections at any time, even if your campaign has started.
Roku's channel partners (i.e. the top 100 ad support apps on Roku) will also be viewing your "ad category" and may choose to block.
Sensitive Ad Categories with age considerations (i.e. Alcohol targeting AD21+) may choose to build their target audience using age ranges listed in the platform. That said, Roku will share your ad category with our channel partners who will choose to place your ads in their content when and where appropriate. Just make sure your IAB category is set up properly.
Special Ad Categories can be selected at the ad account, campaign, and creative level. The selection of these categories at any stage will reduce your targeting options.
Political: will not be able to target by income.
Credit, Housing, and Employment: will not be able to target by income, age, gender, or zip-code.