Beta Testing Adwords Demographic Bidding
Do you know your customer demographics? If so then you could benefit from Google’s new Demographic Bidding campaign setting. Google began beta testing demographic bidding at end of January.
What exactly is the demographic bidding?
Demographic bidding is a way to choose your audience by age and gender. If you want your ads to reach women aged 18-24, or people over 55, demographic bidding can help.
Some publishers on the Google content network know certain individual details about their users. Social networking sites, for instance, often ask users to identify themselves by age and gender. For sites that provide this type of information about their users, Google AdSense can display your AdWords ads to the demographic groups that you prefer, or prevent your ads from displaying to groups you don’t want to reach. You also can bid more for your preferred demographic groups.
Some Google content network sites offer demographic bidding, but many don’t. Your campaign is likely to have a mix of sites that do and do not offer demographic bidding.
How can you optimize your campaigns?
Here are some typical ways that advertisers use demographic bidding reports to optimize their accounts. Remember that increasing your bid for a demographic will likely increase the frequency with which that particular demographic sees your message. Generally, the greater the increase in the bid, the greater the increase in traffic. We recommend that you run each campaign for at least a week and check the data provided by the demographic bidding report before enabling bid modifiers or restricts.
Increase bids for groups that provide good value. If your conversion rate for men is four times higher than it is for women, you may want to bid more for those male viewers. Increasing your bid should make your ad appear more often to that audience. Additionally, if reaching a particular segment is very important for your campaign, raise your bids to increase the frequency with which that segment is seeing your message. To raise your bids this way, click the ‘Edit’ button in the ‘Make Adjustments’ column of the appropriate age or gender row. You can bid up to “bid + 500%” for any one demographic group.
Hide ads from groups with significant traffic and poor value. If your conversion rate is very low for the 18-24 age range, and they account for 50% or more of your traffic, you might use the ‘Make Adjustments’ feature to restrict your ads from appearing to that group.
As with all AdWords features, we encourage you to experiment, track results (with conversion tracking, if possible), and then make changes based on what you learn. The demographic bidding report is one more way to focus your ad spending on the users that give you the very best results.
Here are some screen shots of the new feature.
Here is what it looks like after you have made your demographic choices. Notice the color match bids that give you a total additional percentage you want to bid for that demographic.
I will update this post as results start coming in. I do expect to see an improvement in some of my clients campaigns especially those that know what their customer demographics are.
