In mid 2019, Google opened up detailed demographics for search campaigns. These live inside the ‘Audience’ section and includes: Parental, Married, Education & Homeowner status — allowing for deeper insights / targeting into the types of users that you are bidding on for paid search.
The new detailed demographic segments for parental status include:
- Parents of Infants (0-1 years)
- Parents of Toddlers (1-3 years)
- Parents of Preschoolers (4-5 years)
- Parents of Grade Schoolers (6 -12 years)
- Parents of Teens (13 – 17 years)
The new detailed married status segments include:
- Single
- In a relationship
- Married
The new detailed education segments include:
- Homeowners – people who own the home or apartment they live in but may still have mortgages.
- Renters – people who are renting the home or apartment they live in.
Depending on your industry, knowing these details about prospects and being able to target (exclude) or even adjust bids for, can give advertisers a huge advantage in the auctions on your campaigns. You can test assumptions and let the data validate!
In this audience report for detailed demographics, you can see that while the data is still early, conversions are starting to show signals around certain types of education levels and homeowners over renters…
In October 2019, Google also made an announcement that it will be rolling out the two new audience targeting options for paid search advertisers — Affinity and In-Market Audiences.
It’s no secret these have been available for a while via the Google Display Network. And I suspect they’ve been working “behind the scenes” in search campaigns for years.
What has changed is that we now have the ability to either “observe” or “target” these segments in our search campaigns. As an agency, we love this for several reasons!
- We can better profile about which kind of users are converting (observe mode).
- We can better optimize our campaigns by focusing (or excluding) certain audience segments that make sense. You can actually make bid adjustments for each segment you have added.
Directly from Google…
Engage people who are passionate about your products!
Consumers increasingly expect ad experiences to be useful, personal, and frictionless. That requires knowing who your audience is and understanding what they want and what they’re passionate about.
Affinity audiences helps you raise awareness and drive consideration among people who have a strong interest in your products. For instance, let’s say you sell camping gear. To reach avid campers, you can pair an affinity audience like “Outdoor Enthusiast” with generic camping keywords. By adding this additional audience layer, you can reach people who are not only searching for camping products, but are also passionate about the great outdoors.
Reach the right people at the right time.
Whether you want to grow your sales or build your brand, it’s important to not only know who your audience is, but also where they are on their path to purchase.
In-market audiences are a great way to reach consumers who are actively researching or comparing products and services. With the holiday season right around the corner, new seasonal event segments for in-market audiences on Search and YouTube are ideal for reaching people with timely offers.
Between Affinity and In-Market audiences, there are many interesting segments to look at. For one of our FinTech clients we are currently observing 135 various segments and you get full reports on each one.
Here is an example of what we are seeing for performance around in-market segments, which is especially useful in understanding what lifetime events help trigger demand for their product. We can see conversions coming in for:
- People interested in purchasing consumer electronics, such as gaming consoles, cameras, and audio equipment.
- People interested in booking travel arrangements.
- People interested in purchasing or leasing a car, motorcycle, truck, or other vehicle.
- People interested in purchasing finance-related products or services.
You can make both direct and indirect assumptions about your users based on the segments provided.
Just like detailed demographics, advertisers have the choice to either “Target” these audiences and exclusively show ads to them or add them as an “Observation” audience to see how these audiences engage with their ads. Then from there, you can adjust bids.
Have fun observing, testing, experimenting, optimizing and winning! Please share your experiences in Comments below, you’ll love to hear what is working for you.