Last week I did a post on the Overview page of Google's New AdWords Experience.

Now I'm going to look at the new Demographics view.

If when you log in to your AdWords account and open a campaign you don’t see the new interface (Google AdWords BETA at top left), click the gear icon (Billing, account settings and help) at top right, then click “Try the faster AdWords BETA”.

You should then be looking at an Overview page with a plot of daily Impressions and Clicks at the top.

Demographics

Demographic data on your site visitors are just one click away from the Overview page.

Click Demographics in the left-hand navigation pane, and you can see estimates of ages and genders of visitors coming to your website from AdWords ads associated with specific ad groups. (You can also put Household Income into the mix, but at this time large numbers of people with UNKNOWN household incomes make that dimension irrelevant.)

At the highest level, by mousing over the chart bars at the top of the page you can see numbers of clickthroughs by Age, Gender, Household Income (although that one’s iffy, as I said), or combinations of those measures.

In the example below, you can see Age and Gender information Google says it has on people who visited a site after clicking on an AdWords ad associated with a Shopping ad group:

What you see here are, from top to bottom:

• Tabs for Age, Gender, Household Income and Combinations. Combinations (BLUE) is the active tab, because we want to be able to see the interactions between age and gender.
• Checkboxes that show which dimensions are in the Combination we’re looking at: Age and Gender.
• Column headings for data of interest: Clicks, Impressions and Clickthrough Rate (CTR). (There are other columns: CPC, Cost, etc. - not shown.)
• Each line of data represents one Age x Gender Combination.

A caution: Google’s segmentation of its users by age and gender is of necessity a Sophisticated Wild-ass Guess; and furthermore each combination contains an UNKNOWN component. So there’s a certain amount of error in these data. But they’re much better than nothing.

What useful information can we get out of these numbers?

1. In this time period, women did more shopping-related searches for which Google believed our ads to be relevant than men did.
2. Among persons of "known" sex and age to whom Google showed our Shopping ads, women aged 45-54 found them most appealing (since they had the max clickthrough rate of 2.90%, which isn't bad).
3. Google showed our Shopping ads to women aged 55-64 more often than to women aged 45-54 (239 ad impressions vs. 138), but for whatever reason women aged 55-64 found our ads much less appealing (0.84% CTR vs. 2.90%).
4. Few people under age 25 searched for anything to which Google thought our ads were relevant, and those few (17 impressions) that did see our ads hated them (0% CTR).

Now we just have to hit those results against our marketing objectives in order to find out if we're on the right track or not.

Since our website is tourism-related, as is the Shopping content, it's a positive indicator than our ads tend to appeal to women, since it's primarily women who research and shop for leisure travel. But if our Shopping tourism product is intended to appeal to all adult women, we have some work to with the under-34 and over-54 segments.

More on the New AdWords Experience later...