The Marchex Blog

Understand and optimize your Google Ads account based on demographic and audience targeting data

You are a marketer who uses paid search to drive phone calls for your business. You’ve taken the steps to set up your Google Ads campaigns, ad groups, keywords, and ads with the standard best practices.  You know the value of call analytics and you are powering your decision making with a cutting-edge call analytics solution that is accurate and scalable.   

You know what keywords can drive the type of calls you want but you are looking for the next step in optimizing your account for revenue and return beyond the basics.  You are ready to start optimizing your account based on demographic and audience targeting data but where to begin? 

As with all segmentation, collecting enough data that is accurate is key to making any decision. Google Ads can show demographic data at any time, but you must opt in to your audience targeting to collect data for those segments.  As a best practice, always add in audience targeting with each new campaign at the start and set your audience to observational.  This means you will serve ads to all audiences and will collect data on the specific audiences you have selected.   

The Google Ads demographics report shows age, gender, household income, or any combination of the three at either the campaign or ad group level 

There are many options for audience targeting with Google Ads.  The list below breaks out each option: 

Who they are

Parental status, marital status, homeownership, education, etc.

Example: Home insurance company that wants to target only homeowners.  

What are their interests (Affinity)

People grouped by their habits or interests

Example: “Frequently Dines Out” affinity and you are a restaurant that offers outside dining with reservations over the phone. 

What are they actively researching (In-market)

People interested in engaging with a specific service provider

Example: “Roofing Services” for people interested in hiring professional roofer. 

How they have interacted with your business

Similar Audiences, Website Visitors

Example: This is how you retarget someone who has visited your website. Alternatively, you can upload your current customers to Google Ads for targeting searchers with similar traits. 

You have now added in your audiences and have collected enough data on your existing campaigns using a call analytics solution that is able to accurately tag your conversions from phone calls and upload that data into your Google Ads conversion tracking.   

Here’s an example:

We used a large roofing company that specializes in new roof installation in Phoenix, AZ. The company optimized their Google Ads account based on demographic and audience targeting data. 

We reviewed their results and saw the below results for their age demographic.

What they found was that the 55 – 64 age segment was the highest revenue and return group.  The differences in keyword and call results were not enough to create separate campaigns to target only this group or remove other groups. In this case, the roofing company changed the bid adjustment setting for this age group to increase bids by 25% to position more aggressively when a searcher was from this segment.

Next, the roofing company looked at their income demographic segmentation.

They identified that the return on ad spend from the top 10% was extremely high and there was more potential for this group.  They created a unique campaign to target only the top 10% income searchers.  They leveraged Google Ads automated bidding to maximize conversions.

After segmenting for only this group, they were also able to identify from their call spotting that callers from this segment were most interested in their high-end clay roofs, so they included keywords and ad copy specific to that roof type.

This is just the beginning of how you can optimize your Google Ads account based on demographic and audience targeting data with call analytics.

If you are interested in exploring how Call Analytics can help you optimize your digital advertising budget, learn about our Call Analytics solution, Marchex Marketing Edge.

Request a demo or sign up for a free 30-day trial.