Currently within Google Ads these are the available age categories:
You can set bid adjustments on these categories, or you can exclude certain age groups altogether. If all age groups make orders / enquiries of the same value, then typically you would set a bid adjustment in proportion to their conversion rate. So you are improving your profitability by saying you will bid more on age groups that are more likely to take action, and bid less on those that are less likely. This results in your ads appearing higher and getting more clicks from the more promising age groups, but paying a bit more per click too.
Your service may be more popular among people of a certain age. However this doesn’t mean that this more popular age group is the highest converting age group. For instance you may not get many 20 year-old men searching for a flat cap, however the ones that do may be more likely to buy from an online store than a 65 year old.
So the highest volume of searches might be 65+ but the highest converting group may be a younger group. Here are some things to consider:
- For non-ecommerce sites, to maximise profit your bids should be set based on the conversion rate of the age group.
- For e-commerce you need to check if the order value is different for each age group, a particular group may spend more or buy more expensive items.
- For some other industries that are aren’t ecommerce the order size may still vary depending on age:
- life insurance, health insurance
- older people tend to have more expensive houses and cars so industries related to these may want to pay more for a conversion from older people.
- Anything from decorating services to divorce services may want to take this in to consideration
- older people tend to earn more and are more advanced in their careers so industries to do with employment, HR, recruitment may want to bid more, as well as many B2B service businesses.
- Some services are only suitable for certain age groups like Pension Release Schemes so you may want to block people that are too young or too old.
For more information on considerations, especially when looking at conversion rate, check out my article on device bid adjustments. There is a formula in that article that you can use for calculating age bid adjustments.