Detailed demographics in Google Ads: Targeting with precision

You’ve probably played around with Demographics in your Google Ads campaigns, but have you experimented with Detailed Demographics?

This audience targeting technique is a powerful tool for reaching your ideal customers – and excluding your not-ideal customers.

This article will cover:

• Basic vs. Detailed Demographics: What’s the difference?
• What type of Detailed Demographics are available in Google Ads?
• How to use Detailed Demographics in your campaigns
• Sample use cases for Detailed Demographics

Basic vs. Detailed Demographics: What’s the difference?

Your basic demographic options in Google Ads are age, gender, parental status, and household income. In most campaign types, you can exclude certain demographics, or make bid adjustments with manual bid strategies.

Detailed Demographics are a type of audience targeting that goes one layer deeper. For example, while demographics let you choose parents vs. not parents, detailed demographics let you zoom in on “parents of infants,” “parents of toddlers,” “parents of teens,” etc.

What type of Detailed Demographics are available in Google Ads?

Google Ads offers a range of detailed demographic options, including:

• Parental Status: for example, Parents of Infants or Parents of Teens
• Marital Status: Single, In a Relationship or Married
• Education: for example, Current College Student or Advanced Degree holder
• Homeownership Status: Homeowners or Renters
• Employment – Company Size, Industry: for example, Technology Industry

It’s important to remember that most of this data is inferred by Google. If you’re curious about what Google thinks it knows about you, you can check “My Ad Center.”

How to use Detailed Demographics in your campaigns

You can add Detailed Demographics to your Search, Shopping, Display, Demand Gen, and Video campaigns by going to Audiences, keywords and content > Audiences > Edit audience segments.

You can also add Detailed Demographics to your Performance Max audience signals.

Finally, you can exclude Detailed Demographics from Search and Display campaigns, since they do not (yet) use the Audience Builder workflow. 

Sample use cases for Detailed Demographics

While there are infinite scenarios where leveraging Detailed Demographics might help your campaign performance, here are a few examples from my coaching practice to inspire your strategizing.

• Targeting specific demographic segments: If you sell products or services that appeal to a specific demographic, such as homeowners or college students, Detailed Demographics can help you reach them more effectively.
• B2B targeting: If your target customers are other businesses, you can use company size and industry to reach the right decision-makers.
• Excluding irrelevant demographic segments: If your products or services aren’t suitable for certain demographics, you can exclude them to avoid wasting ad spend. For example, if you install inground pools, it probably makes sense to exclude renters.
• Complementing or substituting Life Events targeting: Detailed Demographics can sometimes serve as a substitute or complement to life events targeting. For example, instead of targeting people who recently got married, you could target people who are currently married. Instead of targeting people who are about to graduate college, you can target current college students.

In my experience, Detailed Demographics are most effective when used in conjunction with Search or Shopping campaigns. Because they are quite broad, I rarely use them on their own for Display, Demand Gen, or Video campaigns. Similarly, I rarely add them to Performance Max audience signals.

Think of Detailed Demographics as a helpful layer on top of your other content or audience targeting strategies in Google Ads.

This article is part of our ongoing weekly Search Engine Land series, Everything you need to know about Google Ads in less than 3 minutes. Every Wednesday, Jyll highlights a different Google Ads feature, and what you need to know to get the best results from it – all in a quick 3-minute read.