What are Detailed Demographics
Detailed Demographics allow us to place bid adjustments on previously unavailable segments. These segments include:
- Marital Status
- Home Ownership
- Education Level
- Parental Status
- Education level is especially useful for educational institutions because you can for example bid up on people without a Bachelor’s degree.
Where to Find DD in Google Ads
- Unlike traditional demographic segments, Detailed Demographics are found under the Audience tab inside Google Ads.
- We have to add them as audience lists to each of our campaigns.
- Adding Detailed Demographic lists early on is important because we will only be able to see Detailed Demographics data if we have the lists added to our campaigns.
- Performance data for Detailed Demographic segments will not be available for campaigns without applied lists.
Adding DD Lists
Click to add a new audience list and go to “Who they are.”
Next Steps
- After adding our Detailed Demographics audiences, we want to bid adjust accordingly.
- We take the overall CVR of the campaign that we’re looking at and bid adjust audiences with higher CVR positively while negatively bid adjusting audiences with lower CVR than the baseline.
- For example: The baseline CVR of a campaign is 5%, so anything converting at a rate of above 5% will be positively adjusted and anything converting below 5% will be negatively adjusted.
Bid Adjustments
How Bid Adjustments Work
Positive
Starting bid: $1
Mobile adjustment: +20%
Bid adjustment formula: $1 + ($1 x 20%) = $1.20
Resulting bid for searches on mobile devices: $1.20
Negative
Starting bid: $1
Mobile adjustment: -20%
Bid adjustment formula: $1 + ($1 x -20%) = $0.80
Resulting bid for searches on mobile devices: $0.80
Multiple Bid Adjustments
Multiple bid adjustments get added on to each other after each adjustment is calculated.
Starting bid: $1
California adjustment: +20%
Bid adjustment formula: $1 + ($1 x 20%) = $1.20
Saturday adjustment: -50%
Bid adjustment formula: $1.20 + ($1.20 x -50%) = $0.60
Resulting bid for searches in California on Saturday: $0.60
Notes
- We have to be careful of making too many positive bid adjustments because they can stack together and unknowingly increase our bids.
- There is a hard cap of +900% of the original bid.
- Always break out branded vs non-branded when setting bid adjustments!
An Example Bid Adjustment Case
Let’s suppose we are marketing a University and we have the following CVR data in the education segment:
- High School Graduates have a 7.13% CVR
- College Graduates have a 4.94% CVR
- Our average CVR is 5.31%
Bid adjustment = (1 – (CVR / Average CVR)) * -1
High School Bid Adjustment = (1 – (0.0713 / 0.0531)) * -1
High School Bid Adjustment = (1 – 1.3427) * -1
High School Bid Adjustment = -0.3427 * -1
High School Bid Adjustment = 0.3427
High School Bid Adjustment = +34%
College Graduates Bid Adjustment = (1 – (0.0494 / 0.0531)) * -1
College Graduates Bid Adjustment = -7%
