As a business owner, it’s important to get your product or service in front of the right audience. When it comes to online advertising, the ability to target people who are likely to buy what you’re offering and weed out those who aren’t can make (and save) you a lot of money.

Online advertising is flexible and powerful. By using platforms like Facebook and Google AdWords, you can hand-select the type of people you want to target with your ads—and those you don’t.

The best part?

You can calculate the ROI of your efforts. This allows you to prove value and make adjustments as needed.

Historically, targeting specific types of people with your ads was only possible using display advertising, but Google AdWords has added the ability to target specific demographics when they search for your targeted keywords in Google. This allows companies to have more control over how their advertising dollars are spent and helps deliver higher-quality leads from digital ads.

What Is Demographic Segmentation and Why Use It?

Demographic segmentation is the ability to choose which groups of people see your ads. You can target people based on age, gender, and other information. You can also exclude people you know wouldn’t be good candidates for your product.

Segmenting your audience this way means you can serve your ads only to people who are likely to convert into leads and you don’t waste time or money on people who won’t become your customers. This is known as optimizing. With more visibility into your demographics and greater optimization of search campaigns, you can cut search costs and ensure more qualified leads.

Which Demographics Are Targetable?

There are currently four demographics you can target in your search campaigns, but with the ability to include and bid higher on some demographics and exclude or bid lower on others, this gives you a lot of options. Here are the current demographics you can choose from:

Gender

Choose from:

• Male
• Female
• Unknown

Age

Choose from:

• 18-24
• 25-34
• 35-44
• 45-54
• 55-64
• 65 or more
• Unknown

Parental Status

Choose from:

• Parent
• Not a parent
• Unknown

Household Income

Choose from:

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

2 Steps to Making Demographic Targeting Work for Your Search Campaigns

Step 1 – Determine if the product or service you sell is attributable to a certain demographic slice.

It’s important to understand whether what you’re selling appeals to one demographic over another. You can discover this in your Google AdWords instance or through any persona research you may have done for your brand.

For example, as a pediatrician, you may want to exclude 18-24-year-olds from your search campaign because people that age aren’t considered children, and usually are not yet parents.  For a doctor focusing on geriatrics, you may want to target people only at a minimum age of 65 or more. OB/GYNs would want to target females.  You can also apply demographics to different procedures or services as well.

Maybe you’re selling a high-end product like Rolex watches. You may wish to target an older age group or top income earners.

At the same time, you need to determine who your target market is not. Maybe you’re a plastic surgeon who primarily does procedures on females; you may want to exclude men from your campaign and bid higher on women of a certain age and income.

If you haven’t done extensive brand and persona research, you’ll need to bring in some tools to help you discover who your target market really is. We recommend using the Customer Avatar Worksheet from digitalmarketer.com to get a great idea of who is buying what you’re selling, literally.

If based on your findings, you feel that your product will benefit from demographic target advertising, you can proceed to the next step.

Step 2 – Optimize spend.

Now that you who you should be targeting, you can work to optimize your spend. Here’s what we recommend to get the most out of your targeting.

Exclude Some Demographics

The real value in demographic targeting is the ability to identify the demographics that don’t work for you and exclude them. There are often more demographics that don’t work for you than those that do; you’ll save time and money by excluding people who will drive up your ad spend and bog down the sales cycle without converting.

Bid Less on Certain Demographics with Negative Bid Adjustments

Google AdWords allows you the capability to adjust the bids you make on certain keywords to fit your target. A negative bid adjustment allows you to bid less (say 20% less) on certain demographics based upon their desirability.

If you have multiple demographics that work for you, but some work better than others, you can use negative bid adjustments to determine how frequently you’d like to serve your ads to each demographic.

Bid Up Other Demographics to Move Your Ads Up in Position

If you have one or more demographics that are ideal for your product, you will want to increase your bid on certain keywords that you’re using to target people in this group.  This will help to move your ad into one of the top four positions in Google’s search results.

Combine Demographics

Your ideal demographic is often a combination of the targets we mentioned earlier. With AdWords demographic targeting you can select more than one taxonomy at a time. For example, if you’re an OBGYN office, you may want to target women ages 25-34 who may be thinking of having children, while simultaneously excluding men.

Get Started with Segmenting

Just by understanding your demographics and using the right tools, you can create powerful search campaigns that bring in more of the qualified leads you’re looking for and fewer of the ones you aren’t.

We recommend that you download the Customer Avatar Worksheet from digitalmarketer.com to discover your demographics and then let Frontier Marketing connect you with the tools you need and help you create campaigns that drive results.