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Adjust Demographic Bids
Adjust Demographic Bids

Why adjusting bids by age, gender, income and parental status can optimise your spend.

Shaquira Jeyasingh avatar
Written by Shaquira Jeyasingh
Updated over a week ago

What's demographic targeting?

You can add demographic targeting to your ad groups, campaigns and campaign groups in your Search, Display or Video campaigns. Digging into this via the Google Ads platform can be a lengthy process, so Opteo offers a more seamless option to approach this.

How will adjusting my bids by demographic segment help?

Demographic bid modifiers allow you to bid different amounts for different demographics. For example, if your business caters to a specific set of customers within a particular group, you can focus your ads on a specific customer segment according to their gender, age group, income or parental status."

Usually, though, things aren't quite so clear-cut. It may not be obvious how your landing pages, ad copy, and offers appeal to various demographic segments.

It's worth looking at the data and working from there. Check which segments perform better, and adjust your bid modifiers to match the performance difference.

Good news! We've already sliced up that data for you in our Segments tab. Learn about segments here.

How does this improvement work?

Opteo will continuously monitor your Display and Search segment performance, looking for optimisation opportunities. When we find campaign segments with significant CPA differences, we'll prompt you to adjust a demographic bid.

We'll show you a chart comparing segments inside a campaign. You'll be able to see if a particular segment is underperforming compared to your CPA target.

We'll recommend an optimal bid adjustment — all you have to do is approve it or Adjust it to your liking.

Note: You may see a recommendation to reduce bids on a particular segment, even though other segments in the same campaign have a higher CPA. This improvement is not concerned with bringing segment CPA in line with your target. Instead, the aim is to bring overall campaign CPA in line with the campaign group average/target. We'll recommend adjustments to the segment that will bring the most impactful change to the overall campaign CPA.

How does this improvement work if I'm using an automated bidding strategy?

If you're using an automated bidding strategy, then Opteo will not recommend adjusting your bid modifiers — Google handles that part.

Instead, we focus on spotting any demographics that aren't performing well for your ads and suggest excluding them. This way, you keep control over your targeting, while still enjoying the benefits of automated bidding.

We only recommend excluding a demographic if its CPA is three times higher than the average, or if its ROAS is lower than one-third of your average ROAS.

Exclusions are always applied at the ad group level, but if there's consistent underperformance, we might suggest excluding a demographic in multiple ad groups at the same time.

Technical notes:

  • To avoid going over budget, we tend to recommend negative bid modifiers rather than positive bid modifiers.

  • This improvement uses Minimum Clicks to make a decision.

  • Opteo's recommended bid modifiers will always be capped at +/-30%. You're welcome to Adjust them outside of this range.

  • Our suggestions range from -30% to +30%. If you've already got bid adjustments applied, we won't overwrite them — they'll be merged via multiplication. It's useful to know that internally, Google Ads saves bid adjustments as decimal multipliers (e.g. +12% as 1.12,  -40% as 0.6). So, applying an adjustment of +20% (1.2) to an existing +30% (1.3) will yield a final bid increase of 56% (1.2 * 1.3 = 1.56).

  • For each segment, we'll base our recommendation on look-back windows using at least 14 days worth of data.

  • We'll only generate these recommendations to search and display campaigns bidding by manual / eCPC.


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