Geographic Income Targeting in AdWords

Are you advertising products on AdWords that fall within a specific income demographic?

AdWords’ income-based targeting allows you to show ads based on the average income of a particular region. Check out today’s video for an overview of income targeting!

Timestamps:
[0:38] Introduction to income targeting
[1:02] How income targeting works
[1:38] Screencast showing how to set up income targeting

Transcript:
Are you using AdWords to sell a high-end product? Are you trying to reach high income customers because you’re selling luxury real estate, expensive clothing, or maybe one-of-a-kind travel experiences? Maybe, just maybe, you’re selling clocks, just like this one.

If you are the guy that sells those clocks please reach out to us. We want to run the advertisements, we’ll do it for free, it would just be amazing.

But in the meantime, while I’m waiting for that phone call, we’re going to talk about how you can target high income customers on the AdWords marketing platform.

I’m Adam Arkfeld, owner of ParaCore, a pay-per-click lead generation agency.

[0:38] Introduction to income targeting
In Google AdWords there are a couple of standard types of targeting that everybody’s aware of.

You have Geographic targeting which picks up people in certain locations, you have Keyword targeting which allows you to match your ad with the keywords that people are searching, you have Negative keywords that refine those keywords searches even more, but there’s one Geographic targeting method that not everybody is aware of.

It’s technically a demographic location group that segments your market based on their income range.

[1:02] How income targeting works
The information is based on publicly released information that’s provided by the Internal Revenue Service, and segments people into an income group. It’s only available in the United States.

What ultimately ends up happening is the IRS has everyone’s tax information and they release certain parts of that to the public.

Google AdWords pulls that in, enters it into AdWords, and then allows you as an advertiser to segment your marketing based on those zip codes or locations that are in the upper tier of the demographic targeting.

So if you’re selling luxury goods or very expensive items, you can target based on the income range of those locations and get very specific to increase your likelihood of conversion.

[1:38] Screencast showing how to set up income targeting
I want to give you an idea of what this looks like in the AdWords interface so if you do decide to do Income targeting, you know what your options are when you’re setting it up.

You’re going to go to the Settings tab of your campaign, this is only available in the campaign level, and you’re going to go down to Locations. You’re then going to hit Edit, Advanced Search, and on the left hand side here you’re going to see what your current targeting is set to.

If you head over to the Locations Group tab, choose Location Group Type, Demographics, here is where you have the option to choose your household income tier, your top 10%, 11 to 20, all the way down to the 50% and then lower 50%.

So if I choose 11 to 20 percent, and then I choose the Phoenix area, and then I hit add, and I’ll remove this one, now I’m targeting anyone in the Phoenix area where their average income is between 11 and 20 percent based on the Internal Revenue Service public data that’s been published by the government.

You can layer these on top of each other so that you can do the top 50 percent, for example I’ll go down to 31 to 40 percent, so now instead of just targeting by geographic location, you’re targeting by average household income.

So if you’re selling a higher ticket item, this is a great way to filter out people that maybe it’s not very relevant to and target a very specific demographic.

So the next time you’re selling expensive items on Google AdWords, try Income-based targeting. You’ll likely increase your conversion rate while lowering your cost per lead.

Thanks for watching and as always, subscribe to our channel. We’re going to be creating a lot more videos just like this one for marketers just like you.