"Unknown" Age and Gender in Adwords

[Island]

I've consistently seen unknown age and gender demographics performing horribly in Adwords even if its a product that does reasonably well in most age/gender demographics. (I.e it should do reasonably decent in unknown because it does reasonably decent in pretty much every age demographic but unknown just tanks horribly).

Maybe its because kids get lumped into the unknown category? I"m guessing Google gets a lot of data from people being logged into its services.

Also it could be because people they have data on take actions that result in them being more likely to be buyers.

I'm going to run a split test by excluding Unknown age. I've already excluded unknown gender which had a very good effect on ROI.

 

[CCarter]

@Island I suspect unknown age might be bots and other things Google can't get a proper read on. I'm also going to try to exclude this in a campaign and test it out. We might need @eliquid's thoughts on this one...

 

[eliquid]

you have a mix of things going on...

people on browsers that have increased security ( ad blockers, etc ), kids, bots, and all kinds of things ( people not signed into their Google profile, but maybe on a new IP assigned to them by ISP, cell phone but not logged in and on a IP like wifi not recorded in use by them before, etc ).

I havent seen where unknowns cause lower ROI, but every campaign is different. Just remove what doesn't work for you. A lot of my campaigns don't have this issue, but again.. you optimize based on YOUR needs.

 

[schindyguy]

eliquid is right, it depends

I'd consider Google, Facebook and Yahoo to be the only sources of traffic where demo data can be directly measured. Everywhere else ad networks use third party data (i.e. Bluekai) to layer in targeting usually inferred by cookies which has never worked for any of my performance campaigns. Now if you've got some Coca Cola budget and they want to get 40 somethings making over 40k/yr with 2 kids and a puppy, that's what I'd use third party data for and use a DSP to buy

But on Yahoo, Google or Facebook, someone filled out a profile, and you're able to target that user directly when they're signed in. I'd call that first party data. Facebook is 100% sure based on what demo data the user entered initially. Google and yahoo not so much. They both have signed in users, but the unknown on Google means they haven't signed in (although in their docs they refer to it as inferred still)

"We don't infer demographics for all people, and most websites don't provide demographic information for their customers. In addition, some websites on the Display Network opt out of demographic targeting, so if you want to show your ads on those sites, leave the "Unknown" category selected." https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/2580383?hl=en

On yahoo by adding demo targeting, you are excluding unknowns and only targeting first party (i.e. signed in) users.

But what does this all mean? Because your question was Google specific you probably didn't care about the rest but it depends on your campaign and testing. For me I like to start with first party data, once I've extracted all that I can out of it I break out an unknown only campaign separately to test scaling it even further. Don't necessarily believe googles claim that excluding unknowns limits your scale. I've got one campaign currently spending over $5k/day for the last 3 weeks and it's only mobile without targeting unknowns.