Reaching the right members: Audience Targeting for Credit Unions

Why Targeting Got Harder (And Why That’s a Good Thing)

If you lead marketing at a credit union, you’ve felt the shift: audience targeting isn’t what it used to be. Privacy regulations, automation, and platform restrictions within Google Ads, especially for financial services categories, have rewritten the rules of digital reach.

Our advertising team navigates these shifts every day, and after attending Jyll Saskin Gales’s session, “Advanced Audience Targeting in Google Ads,” at SMX Advanced, and studying her book Inside Google Ads: Everything You Need To Know About Audience Targeting, we’ve been refining and testing these strategies with our credit union clients.

The takeaway? Smart targeting in financial services is about better alignment between intent, identity, and compliant execution. When those elements work together, your campaigns can find:

• Stronger leads, 
• Prove value to leadership
• Scale growth without chaos.

From Intent vs. Identity to Intent × Identity

Jyll’s framework starts with a simple concept: the most effective campaigns live at the intersection of intent (people looking for your offer) and identity (people who fit your ideal audience). 

For credit unions, that intersection might look like:

• Gen Z young professionals comparing auto loan rates who also live within a short radius of your branch
  
  
• Homeowners searching for HELOC options who already show loyalty to community-based banking
  
  
• Seniors exploring high-yield CDs who have interacted with your competitors’ sites

The goal isn’t to reach everyone. It’s to focus on the overlap that matters most. 

Remember where intent meets identity, and that’s where the magic begins.

What You Can (and Can’t) Control in Financial Services Targeting

In most industries, advertisers can narrow campaigns using detailed demographics or layered audience filters. Financial institutions like credit unions and community banks, however, operate under stricter ad-category policies. 

Google limits targeting options such as age, gender, parental status, and ZIP-code specificity to ensure fairness and compliance.

That means traditional first-party and demographic targeting is limited for credit unions and community banks. 

Uploading member lists or narrowing to small geographic areas often triggers review or restriction. 

At Geear, we see this as an opportunity rather than a limitation. By combining the data you can use with a creative strategy, you can still build high-performing, policy-safe campaigns.

The Four Inputs

In her SMX Advanced session, Jyll outlined four key targeting inputs: Google’s data, your data, custom data, and automation. For credit unions, these aren’t separate levers to pull, they’re components of an adaptive, compliant system.

1. Google’s Data
   Privacy-safe signals like in-market audiences (e.g., “Boats & Watercraft”) and affinity categories (e.g., “Water Sports Enthusiasts”) remain available and effective; these examples could help craft an incredibly qualified group of users who may be seeking a specialty vehicle loan for a jet ski purchase. These broad, policy-compliant audiences can power reach while still reflecting relevant financial intent.
   
   
2. Your Data (First-Party)
   First-party data, website visits & Customer Match lists, remains powerful but comes with stricter oversight for financial institutions. At Geear, we help credit unions and community banks focus on high-intent signals, such as visitors who submit an initial inquiry form or spend a minimum amount of time on your site. These audiences often become the foundation for compliant lookalike expansion when allowed.
   
   
3. Custom Data
   Custom segments let advertisers define audiences by behaviors or topical interests rather than personal identifiers. For instance, targeting people searching for “best CD rates today” or visiting popular rate websites and apps reflect intent without breaching demographic or privacy policies.
   
   
4. Automation
   Google’s automation, optimized targeting, audience signals, and lookalike modeling connects the dots between what you know and what the algorithm learns. Automation doesn’t replace your strategy; it amplifies it. By feeding automation strong signals and compliant parameters, we help credit unions scale reach to new, qualified members without risking policy violations.

Together, these four inputs form a practical roadmap for today’s financial advertisers: broad enough to protect compliance, focused enough to drive measurable growth.

Non-Linear Targeting: The Smart Alternative

Because demographic and first-party targeting are limited, non-linear targeting is where creative opportunity lives. Instead of defining audiences by static traits, you find them through context, influence, and behavior.  The content they consume, the goals they pursue, and the life moments they’re navigating.

For example:

• Reaching potential HELOC applicants through home-renovation and DIY video content
  
  
• Connecting with small-business owners via entrepreneurship podcasts or accounting software channels
  
  
• Promoting youth savings programs through parenting and education interest groups
  
  

These connections may seem indirect, but they mirror how real financial decisions happen, in layers, not linear paths. Our team has seen this approach outperform traditional targeting, helping credit unions reach members earlier in their decision journey while staying within policy boundaries. Non-linear targeting is not a loophole; it’s a strategy shift. It respects compliance while unlocking creativity.

A Modern Targeting Playbook for Credit Unions

Jyll’s “modern targeting strategy” distills down to three steps that our team at Geear is actively testing and refining with credit unions today:

1. Define your audience and offer clearly.
   Be specific: “We want to promote HELOCs to homeowners within our service area who are likely completing renovation work on their own, as a hobby, not as an emergency fix.” That clarity helps your creative team stay aligned with Google’s targeting options.
2. Brainstorm compliant ways to reach both sides of your Venn.
   Blend audience signals (Google’s, yours, and custom) with content placements across Search, YouTube, Display, Maps, Gmail and more. We’ve found the best results come from layering broad intent data with contextual content and meeting people where they are.
3. Craft messaging that attracts the right members and filters out others.
   Enticing and relevant creative is your final layer of targeting. A message like “Is your bathtub crying out for a makeover?” appeals directly to the right audience and quietly dissuades the rest. This framework keeps campaigns focused and fully compliant.

Performance isn’t just impressions and clicks. The real success metrics for credit unions are completed applications, funded loans, and deposits. Our team helps clients connect ad data to funded-loan ratios, deposit growth, and cross-sell activity, translating marketing metrics into board-level impact. That’s what turns advertising into a growth engine, not just a report.

How Geear Helps

At Geear, our mission is simple: help credit unions and community banks grow with clarity, focus, and impact. We bring together strategy, data, and execution to make complex advertising systems work for credit unions and community banks within compliance, at scale, and with measurable outcomes.

Our advertising specialists are continually testing Jyll Saskin Gales’s frameworks in real-world campaigns, ensuring growth becomes intentional, not accidental.

Learn What Our Advertising Experts Can Do For You. Click here to schedule a call with your team.