To get the biggest bang for your advertising buck, it makes sense to target the people most likely to be interested in your product or service. Sounds obvious, doesn’t it?  

Less self-evident is how far to go in fine-tuning your target audience. If you’re selling window shutters and based in Wellington, you obviously want to reach people in Wellington who are looking for window shutters.  

But if you want your advertising budget to work even harder for you, you may want to find out more about the person typing “window shutters Wellington” into the Google search bar. Your ideal lead may be people of a certain age, gender, or even household income.   

New Zealand is one of the few countries that collects Household Income information, and we often help our clients use this to their advantage.   

We do this with demographic targeting in Google Ads, which gives you the option to narrow your audience so that people outside of your chosen demographics won’t see your ads. This increases the chances that anyone clicking on your ad will be genuinely interested in what you’re selling. And that’s important, because you pay for every click. 

Google can (and does) collect this kind of information from people using the internet, even if they’re not signed in on their Google account.  

When people are signed in, Google can draw demographic data from their account information, activity on Google properties, and data provided from social networking sites to determine that account’s characteristics. 

If a searcher isn’t signed in on a Google account, Google can infer demographic information based on the way the searcher uses Google properties and the websites on the Display Network (sites where ads can appear) that they visit. This is done through the use of cookies. 

You can fine-tune your target audience further with psychographic data and show your ads to audiences based on who they are, their interests and habits, what they’re actively researching, or how they have interacted with your business. 

  • Demographics may include basic information such as gender, age, education, employment, income and marital status. 
  • Psychographics include personal interests, attitudes, values, desires and specific behaviours. 

You can find more detailed information about audience targeting at Google Ads help

Alternatively, Contact us today for a no-obligation discussion about fine-tuning your marketing. We can help you access the various types of data available and target the searcher behind the search term, which will help you make the most of opportunities to increase sales.  

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