Exercise 15: Manage target audiences

Target audiences are groups of people—such as departments or teams—that you can recommend for users to share their items with. You can add them to users' sharing settings in a Google service, such as Google Drive or Chat, to encourage users to share items with a more specific or limited audience rather than your entire organization.

Why use target audiences?

Target audiences provide users with another way to share their items, in addition to sharing with your entire organization or sharing directly with users or groups.

With Admin-recommended audiences, you can:

Improve the security and privacy of your data: Target audiences give users more control over how broadly they share their items. This can help improve the security of your organization’s data, and the privacy of a user's data, by reducing the potential for users to accidentally overshare their files, Chat discoverable spaces, or other items.
Make it easier for users to share appropriately: Target audiences can reduce your users' need to enter groups and specific users to share with and to respond to access requests. Instead, target audiences allow users to easily broaden access to items without worrying about security, since these audiences are approved by their Administrator. Moreover, sharing with a target audience doesn't send sharing notifications to audience members, making these audiences convenient for broad sharing.

When creating a target audience:

Let's see the scene

In this exercise, you’ll practice creating a target audience and applying it to a Google Workspace service.

Looks like the Sales team needs a little help. Let's take a look at the latest email from Raha G.

Exercise directions

Step 1: Create a target audience

Step 1

If you are not already signed in, sign in to your domain as the Administrator at admin.google.com.

Step 2

From the main menu, navigate to Directory, then select Target audiences.

Step 3

Click Create a target audience.

Step 4

Enter Sales as the name for your target audience.

Step 5

Click CREATE.

Step 6

Click ADD MEMBERS.

Step 7

Click Add members, and add the Sales group you created in a previous exercise by entering the name of the group.

Step 8

Click ADD. You might have to refresh the page before the target audience appears on the Members list.

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Step 2: Apply the target audience to Drive and Docs

Step 1

Navigate back to the Create a target audience page, and click APPLY TO GOOGLE SERVICES.

Step 2

Click on the Target audiences panel.

Step 3

Click Add target audiences. Check the box next to the Sales target audience you just created.

Step 4

Click SAVE.

Notes

At least one target audience needs to be applied to a Google service. By default, a predefined audience that includes all users in your organization is applied to any services that have target audience settings. You can use the predefined audience or replace it with another audience you created.
You can apply up to five target audiences to a Google service for all or specific users.
To apply target audiences to service, you need to create a policy for an organizational unit or configuration group. You can't apply target audiences directly to a user's account.
For Chat discoverable spaces, you can create a target audiences policy only for the top-level organizational unit. This policy will apply to all child organizational units.
You can set the default—or primary—target audience, which appears first in a user's list of sharing recommendations. You can also set the order the other audiences appear in the list.
When you apply a target audience to a service, it appears in a user's sharing settings for that service.

Help Center resources

For more guidance on target audiences, please explore the Google Workspace Admin Help Center:

Create and manage target audiences ↗

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