AdWords Targeting by Household Income

It seems that no matter how active I am in managing our AdWords accounts or staying up-to-date on news, I always come across new features that I didn’t previously know existed.

Several months back I came across AdWords Location Groups (now just getting around to writing about them.) Come to find out these have been accessible since early Spring… awesome!

AdWords Location Groups add on an additional layer of targeting based on one of the following – Place of Interest (universities, airports, parks/public areas), Household Income or Location Extension radius.

I’ve been testing out the Household Income targeting option, which allows you to target income thresholds for the specific area you are targeting. The income thresholds are lower 50% ($0 – $64,000), 31-40% ($64,001 – $80,000), 21-30% ($80,001 – $102,000), 11-20% ($102,001 – $146,000), Top 10% ($146,001 – >$146,001). So for example, I could target the top 10% household incomes living in North Carolina.

According to Google’s Support center, these numbers are based on publicly available data from the US Internal Revenue Service (IRS).

If interested in testing out, you can follow the below steps:

1.) Select your campaign
2.) Navigate to Settings
3.) Edit Location Info
4.) Choose Advanced Search

5.) Select Location Groups

6.) Drop down ‘Choose location group type’

7.) Select ‘Locations by demographics’, search for desired geographic location, select ‘Select household income tier’

8.) ADD

I’m testing out across several accounts, all in different industries with different targets as far as income tiers go. The below is a quick snapshot from a luxury hotel account

A couple things to note:

• The ‘Top 10%’ segment is performing the best when looking at cost per conversion and conversion rate.
• Keep an eye on volume. I’m targeting top 10% in the US, but if I were to scale that back to a specific state or city, volume would drop off significantly.
• We are currently placing in the number 1 spot and capturing 100% impression share, but if either of these were an issue, we could add a positive bid adjustment to the ‘Top 10%’ target in order to capture more volume and increase average position.