How to Leverage Demographics in Google Ads

There are four demographic categories available in Google Ads that can help you observe trends in your account, narrow down your target audience or adjust bid modifiers for.

We’ll take a look at these categories and how you might use them to improve your account performance.

Demographic Categories in Google Ads

In Google Ads, you can see the following age breakdowns by ad group, campaign or entire account. See the circled filter in the screenshot below to see where you can change this setting.

Age Demographics

  • 18-24
  • 25-34
  • 34-44
  • 45-54
  • 55-64
  • 65+
  • Unknown

Household Income

  • Top 10%
  • 11 – 20%
  • 21 – 30%
  • 31 – 40%
  • 41 – 50%
  • Lower 50%
  • Unknown

Gender

  • Male
  • Female
  • Unknown

Parental Status

  • Non-Parent
  • Parent
  • Unknown

Bonus: Combinations

You can see a combination of two to all four of these demographics in the combinations section.

How To Leverage Demographic Data to Impact Your Account

Exclusions

  1. Think through your target audience and if you should eliminate one of the above categories to better reach your audience. In some cases, this might be obvious. If you’re promoting Maternity clothes, you might want to exclude men. If you’re B2B, exclusions aren’t often part of that strategy.
  2. Look at historical performance. If a particular demographic just hasn’t performed well for you, it maybe to worth eliminating it completely.

Bid Modifiers

  1. By looking at the historical performance, you can decide if you’d like to increase or decrease the bids for a particular demographic or combination based on your KPIs. You can decrease up to 90% or increase up to 900%.

Please note you can also set up automated rules to change the settings of your current demographics. If you’re looking for more ideas on how to use these, check out our post on automated rules.

If you aren’t reviewing your demographic results regularly, you are missing out on key trends and optimization opportunities within your Google Ads account.

How do you use demographic data to optimize your accounts? Comment below to share!