Google Ads Detailed Demographics

Video Transcript:

Demographic targeting has been around for quite some time within Google ads. For years, we can already target age, gender, household income, parental status, depending on what country you are targeting. Now, the new one in the mix is Detailed Demographics, and this is actually part of the audience targeting grouping. And what we can do with Detailed Demographics is what Google says is that we can reach a broad segment of the population that share common traits. So in this video, I want to show you all the options we have for Detailed Demographics, and how you may want to implement them within your Google Ad strategies.

Before we start using Detailed Demographics in any of your campaigns, it’s important to know what campaign types can all use the Detailed Demographics Advertisers can use these audiences in their Search campaigns, in their Shopping campaigns, in Gmail campaigns. Now to clarify, if you’re looking up Detailed Demographics on any of the Google support pages, they do say that display can use Detailed Demographics. But unfortunately, by Display they mean just Gmail. It’s not really called out specifically which is good confusing, but to save you some time, you cannot use Detailed Demographics in your typical display campaigns. We can use detailed demographics in our YouTube campaigns, and then the newer one to the campaign family Detailed Demographics are eligible for some discovery campaigns. Now we’re going to hop back into Google ads.

Now I will show you exactly where you can find the Demographics. I already have a specific ad group chosen within Google Ads. And like I said in the intro, we would think that Detailed Demographics would be in the Demographic section, but it’s not. We actually have to go to the next option up above, which we see right here, and that is Audiences. To start pulling up Detailed Demographics, just click on Add audiences, then we can choose browse, and we want the first option that’s already highlighted. It’s “who they are,” and it even calls out Detailed Demographics. I will admit not all the Detailed Demographics are available for every single account. We had to reach out to our reps to get access to the Employment one, so we’ll still talk about it. But if you’re not seeing it in your account, you may have to reach out to support to try to get access to some of these.

The first Detailed Demographic on top is Parental Status. If we break that segment down, you can target overall parents or if we break that segment down even further. Parents is then broken down by infants, toddlers, preschoolers, grade schoolers, and then teenagers, After parents, we get Marital Status. And there are only three options here: Single, In a relationship, and Married. Easy enough there. So then we can go on to Education. The first option is to target Current College Students, or we can take the Highest Level of Educational Attainment and break that one down even further. Again, going by the highest level we get High School Grad, Someone with a Bachelor’s Degree, or anyone who has an Advanced Degree. Think about your Master’s or your Doctorate. After Education, there’s Homeownership Status. We just get two options here: Homeowners or Renters. And then there’s Employment.

First, we get Company Size, and that one can break down to Small Employer. We see that’s 1 to 250. Then we get Large Employer which is 250 to 10k, and then Very Large Employer with over 10k employees. You can debate about the naming conventions for these categories. I mean, 250 to 10k is a huge range. So really just focus on the amount of employees within these categories and not necessarily the names themselves. And the other segment within Employment is the Industry. In here, we get Construction, Education, Financial, Healthcare, Hospitality, Manufacturing, Real Estate, and Technology. And already we have gone through all the available Detailed Demographics within Google Ads.

Okay, so we covered all the campaign types, and then we covered all the options for Detailed Demographics. So now it’s extremely important that we clarify that you cannot use all of the Detailed Demographics in every single one of the campaign types, Depending on which Detailed Demographic segment you choose, certain segments are limited by certain campaign networks. So let’s go over each Detail Demographic availability by each campaign type. Starting off with Education audiences, we can use Detailed Demographics in all of the campaign types. There are two main categories under the Employment section, and the first one is Company Size. So if you want to look at Detailed Demographics based on these company sizes, you can only use it for your Search campaigns. The other employment segment is going to be Industry. And just like Company Size, we can only use the Industry Detailed Demographic for our Search campaigns.

Next, its Homeownership Status, and Detailed Demographics are available in every single campaign type in this one. Next is Marital Status. And again, we can use Detailed Demographics in all the campaign types. And last, Parental Status. And Detailed Demographics are good once again, in all the campaign types. So let’s go back into Google Ads one more time. And next we’ll go over what options we have for adding these Detailed Demographic audiences to our ad group targeting.

So I’m back in the same ad group where we were and just to clarify, this ad group is part of a Search campaign. So the default option when we’re adding audiences to our Search campaigns is going to be Observation. Think of this as a bid only audience. So this particular account likes to focus on specific industries. And when I add those Detailed Demographics to this ad group, if I leave it in Observation, it’ll allow me to make bid adjustments in the future based on how I see these audiences perform. I say this because our audiences can only start collecting data once they’re implemented. We can’t retroactively look at the data after you add an audience.

So if I save this, and let’s pretend these industries are doing great, I can then choose to increase my bids for any user that falls within this Employment industry or Healthcare industry Detailed Demographic. And we can also do the opposite scenario. I can decrease my bids if I find out that any segment of users within any of these Detailed Demographic audiences are underperforming compared to all the other audiences. Now what Observation does not allow me to do is to control the ad message per audience group. So if I go back in and edit my audiences, we do have the option to switch it to Targeting. So now what I’m telling Google is only show my ads to people who fall within these two Detailed Demographics.

If I scroll down a little bit, we see that I have two in there and how targeting works is going to be more of like an “or” statement. So show my ads only to people who follow the Detailed Demographics of the Financial industry or the Healthcare industry. It’s one or the other. It’s not combining both into one audience now when we’re using audiences for Google Search. Yes, this is just one version of RLSA or remarketing lists for search ads. And when you’re using audiences on Search, you need to have at least 1,000 active users every 30 days for that audience to be eligible for your Search campaigns.

But if your ad accounts are getting a lot of traffic, and you’re seeing certain subsets or certain Detailed Demographics performing a lot better than the others, you may want to consider breaking these audiences out into their own ad groups, or possibly campaigns, to better control the budget. And when we start doing Targeting only on our audiences, we can then change our ad copy, possibly also change the landing page to better focus on the audience that you’re reaching. Here’s one example of how we have broken out the audiences for a current client that we’re working on.

Now, just for the sake of this demo, I had to recreate these ads and tweak the message a little bit just because I can’t show you who it is, but the strategy is exactly the same. So those two industries I picked when I was showing you the Detailed Demographics are the Financial industry and the Healthcare industry. Both of those industries were very important to the client. And two, just through their other campaigns, and the brand awareness they were doing through other marketing efforts, we had a big enough audience to split those two audiences out into their own ad groups. And because of that, we could also change our message to speak to each of these users. It also helped that the client had different landing pages for each of these industries already on their website.

We’re already going after specific terms related to those industries, and that’s fine. Of course, we’re already calling that out in our ad copy. But when we’re using Detailed Demographics, I can still be more specific with my ad copy when going after the high-level, broader generic keywords. And this is because I know users are performing well within these audiences of financial or healthcare. So, within a broader targeted keyword, I can still call out financial benefits in my ad copy. Talking about customer security is very important within this industry. If I flip over to the healthcare ad group, again, we’re calling out the industry that we’re targeting within our ad copy. This time since it’s healthcare related, we make sure HIPAA is called out in the ad copy to really show that we are secure and then changing the information of who they’re targeting. Instead of saying “Your Customers,” we’re saying “Your Patients.” All the little tweaks to really speak to who we want to get in front of.

So now considering what Detailed Demographic options that we have, and if any of them are eligible to your company, think about all the different ways that you may want to split out your message. Now, whatever you’re trying to sell, does it matter if the person is married single in a relationship? Does it matter what age the person’s kids are? Do the services or level of services that you offer change depending on the size of a company? If so, do those benefits or value messages change that can really resonate with someone who falls within a specific company size? And besides just Search ad copy, we know we can use a lot of this on Video, Gmail, Discovery, do the images that you show or the creative that you’re using change to really reflect the audience that you’re targeting? That is the true value of how we can really utilize Detailed Demographics to make a better connection with our target audience.

And then finally, when we’re talking about audience targeting, we also have to mention that you can use audiences for exclusions too. Again, I am in a Search campaign, and all the Detailed Demographics are available for your Search campaigns. So if for whatever reason, I find out that Construction is not really related to what I’m trying to target, or I’ve already added it as an Observation audience. And I see it’s just flat out not performing, and it’s wasting my ad spend. I do have the option to block that out, as well as any of the other Detailed Demographics that we see. It’s a lot easier to get that data with Search, but if you already know who is not part of your target audience, and it’s available as a Detailed Demographic, you can proactively go in there for all the campaign types and start excluding those out if they are available.

But pretty much that is what we get with Detailed Demographics. We’re already seeing some success by breaking these out and targeting them specifically within a few of our accounts. We’re crossing our fingers that we get more options later on. But if you are working on an account that could really use some of the demographics that we went over today, we definitely recommend testing it out in a few of the campaign types to see if you can not only learn more about your target audience, but get better performance out of them as well.

Written by Joe Martinez