Google AdWords Demographic Reporting via the Dimensions Tab

This is the fourth installment in our guide to reporting via the Google AdWords dimensions tab. In the first three posts we covered:

• Google AdWords Dayparting – The AdWords Dimensions Time Tab Report
• Google AdWords Conversion Reporting via the Dimensions Tab
• Google AdWords Destination URL Report

The focus of this post is AdWords demographic reporting functionality within the dimensions tab.

What Is AdWords Demographic Reporting?

Demographic reporting in AdWords allows you to look at the demographics of the prospects you’re targeting on certain sites. One of the powerful things about Facebook advertising is that you’re able to build a demographic profile to target your ads to; AdWords offers similar insights into who your ads are being served to for certain sites that have this type of information on their users, such as MySpace and YouTube.

Typically the types of sites that offer this type of data in your content network campaigns include:

• Social networking sites such as MySpace, Orkut, etc.
• Video sites such as YouTube and Justin.tv
• Dating sites such as Plenty of Fish

And any other site that both collects profile information from its users and monetizes/shares that information via AdSense.

Demographic Bidding in AdWords

Anyone running a content network campaign can pull a demographic report to see how much of your traffic is coming from sites where you can report on and target users by demographic. From there, you can determine how significant a percentage of your traffic this type of target consists of.

If a significant portion of your traffic is driven by these types of sites, you can get a picture of what works and doesn’t demographically and, similar to dayparting, you can allocate budget according to what works:

You can now, at the campaign level, exclude demographic segments that aren’t working and allocate additional budget for segments that are.

Who Should Leverage Demographic Reporting?

Demographic reporting is similar to things like geographic data and day parting: once you’ve worked through the basic fundamentals of constructing a sound pay-per-click campaign (relevant keywords, appropriate use of negatives, sound campaign structure, etc.) analyzing and reacting to these reports can give some campaigns significant lift. The thing to keep in mind is that it’s important to be sure to have the fundamentals nailed down before you start to drill down on these types of modifications, as a poorly constructed campaign will keep any sort of geographic, dayparting, demographic or other targeting from being effective.