No matter how well an ad is written, the one thing that defines its success is how specific it is to the targeted customers and how personalized is the experience it provides to its audience. Although the overall demographics of a market define it as a whole, no two customers are the same and all need a different approach when being targeted.
Google has been working on making its ad campaigns more customer-focused every year. In mid-2018 it launched two fresh features for ad campaigns to allow users to achieve the same results i.e., making the campaigns customer-specific. These two features were detailed demographics and in-market audiences.
Let’s take a closer look into what these features are and how they work, shall we?
Detailed Demographics
The detailed demographics targeting option allows the user to create campaigns specifically targeted at audiences based on things like their Marital Status, Parental Status, Education, or Homeowner Status. The demographic data can be used to create bid adjustments, exclusively targeting a highly coveted demographic, or to block out certain demographics from the campaign reach.
Demographic Targets
As of now, Google has introduced four detailed demographic targets. Let’s take a quick look at each of them:
Marital Status
Since the buying choices of married people vary from that of the bachelors/bachelorettes, this one makes a lot of things easy for marketers. An audience can be sorted into three categories under marital status. These are:
- Single
- Married
- In a Relationship
Parental Status
As the name suggests, parental status filters the audience on the basis of their children. This might not make a lot of sense on the face of it, but considering the fact that the choice of the parents of a 6-year-old differs from that of a 16-year-old this comes in handy. The audience can be separated by:
- Parents of Infants (0-1 years)
- Parents of Toddlers (1-3 years)
- Parents of Pre-schoolers (4-5 years)
- Parents of Grade schoolers (6 -12 years)
- Parents of Teens (13 – 17 years)
Education
This separates people on the basis of their current student status and educational attainment. Four basic filters are included:
- Current College Students
- High School Graduates
- Obtained a Bachelor’s Degree
- Obtained Advanced Degree
Homeowner Status
This one has only two categories, obviously:
- Homeowners
- Renters
Using detailed demographics in a campaign
Here is the step-by-step procedure of adding detailed demographic audiences to a campaign:
- In the overview page of the campaign, click Audiences from the page menu.
- Click on the pencil icon.
- Under All audiences, click Detailed demographics.
- Under Detailed demographics, click on the name of the demographic to open a list of specific demographics for that group.
- Check the box next to each of the specific demographics to add them to the campaign.
- Repeat steps 4 and 5 until you have selected every demographic that needs to be added to your campaign.
- Click Save to add your chosen demographics to your campaign.
In-Market Audiences
The in-market audiences feature allows you to connect with your audience while they are actively looking for or comparing products and services across Google Display Network publisher or any other partner sites.
How do you qualify someone as “in-market”? I’ll tell you… because I’m nice like that.
Google assesses data such as clicks on ads (duh), conversions, visit frequency and recency, and the content of the pages visited to determine if a lead qualifies for this in-market feature. After crunching on all of this data, Google then categorizes the audience to help users target the people most interested in their products or services.
Leveraging this real-time data helps develop a strong classification system and helps develop a trend of the in-market behaviour of a specific customer. In this way, marketers are able to present the right offers at the right time to the people most interested in them.
Available Audiences
Available in-market audiences include:
- Apparel and Accessories
- Autos & Vehicles
- Baby & Children’s Products
- Beauty Products & Services*
- Business Services*
- Computers & Peripherals
- Consumer Electronics
- Consumer Software
- Dating Services*
- Education
- Employment
- Financial Services
- Gifts & Occasions
- Home & Garden
- Real Estate
- Sports & Fitness*
- Telecom
- Travel
* – still in Beta.
So that’s a quick look into a couple of targeting features I use on the reg. Questions? Concerns? Hopes/dreams/fears? Leave ’em all in the comments!