For some businesses, limiting your ads to the right target audience can help to improve your accounts’ efficiency. One of the most underutilized tools is using demographic targeting to help ensure your ads reach the right people while also reducing costs by reaching other groups that don’t typically convert.
What Is Demographic Targeting?
In Google Ads, demographic targeting is a sub-section within the “Audiences” section. For the purpose of this blog, we are strictly talking about Search campaigns. Google Ads allows you to adjust bids, create segments, target or exclude users based on the following attributes:
- Age
- Gender
- Household Income (available depending on your location)
- Parental Status (available depending on your location)
These attributes are known by Google for many users through their search behavior, profile settings, and other sources – not everyone, though. You will always have the option to check or uncheck users whose Age, Gender, or Income is “unknown” to Google as well (it’s typically a significant amount of people).
What Can You Do with Demographic Targeting?
Once a Search campaign is up and running, you should have access to demographic data immediately inside the “Audiences” tab. There are two advanced features that are important to note: Bid adjustments and Exclusions.
- Bid Adjustments: This feature allows you to increase or decrease your bids for certain demographic attributes at the ad group level. One important thing to note is you’ll primarily want to be using Manual CPC bidding in order for those bid adjustments to actually take effect.
- Exclusions: To start, everyone is eligible to see your ads. Exclusions will allow you to subtract certain groups of people based on performance while everyone outside of that group stays eligible. For example, you sell dentures online. Your target market is primarily users over the age of 50, but sometimes you get purchases from people aged 25+, so you don’t want to limit your ads too much. You opt to simply exclude people that fall into the 18-24 age range instead because they never make actual purchases.
Best Practices for Demographic Targeting
Using demographic data can be a powerful tool for most advertisers, but there’s never one right way to use it. Exclusions don’t always make sense for every advertiser – but for some with a very niche target market, it is a great way to get your account more efficient through either bid adjustments on certain groups or targeting/excluding groups altogether.
Our typical recommendation is to first collect enough performance data in your campaign so that you can start to observe trends. From there, you might apply positive bid adjustments to certain top-performing groups or maybe some negative adjustments to underperformers.
If there are obvious groups of people that are driving up your cost and not leading to conversions, that’s where the benefit of exclusions comes in. Adding these will help to reduce your waste inside the campaign going forward. A tip is to note in the campaign name that you are using exclusions in order to clearly distinguish and keep it top of mind during periods of performance review.
Why Use Demographic Targeting
By leveraging age, gender, and income signals, businesses can ensure that their ads reach the most valuable users while reducing wasted spend. Regular check-ins, strategic bid tweaks, and ongoing optimizations can help you get the most out of demographic targeting, leading to better campaign performance and a higher return on investment.
