The report editor is great for diving into segmentation that isn’t available in the interface.
Take a recent example from an account selling moving services – exactly the type of business where you might typically exclude 18-24 year olds, since they’re simply less likely to need professional moving services.
So – I looked at the age range reports with the assumption that I’d probably be excluding 18-24 year olds – until I saw these surprising results:
But here we need to be careful. When it comes to lead gen, conversions are not the end of the story. Spam enquiries, customer service enquiries, job enquiries, inexplicable enquiries… (If you’ve worked with lead gen, you’ll have seen them all.)
The 18-24 range (fairly or not) is often viewed with suspicion, as a disproportionate driver of job enquiries.
So we need another round of vetting to put the seal on this surprising result.
This account is blessed with different conversion actions representing different stages in the lead funnel (an increasingly crucial level of tracking precision).
So to answer this question, we’ll want to segment this table by conv action to see whether the higher-quality conversions – qualified lead and purchase – are also coming through from the 18-24 band.
You can’t segment the age range table at the campaign level (or account-level)…
But you can in the report editor.
Add conversions, conversion actions and age range:
and voila – confirmation. The story now looks even better for 18-24 year-olds.
We were right to be suspicious, but this slightly deeper look shows that the surprising success was real.
This highlights a crucial principle that’s worth remembering in Google Ads: there’s an important difference between users who are less likely to convert in absolute terms, and those who are less likely to convert after they’ve already shown intent by searching for and clicking on your ads. When optimising for CPA, it’s only the latter group that poses a problem.
It’s intuitive to exclude demographic groups who seem less likely to need your product. But when your keyword targeting is doing its job, it’s only people who are looking for your service will see your ads in the first place. And only those sufficiently interested will click through.
Once someone has taken those steps – the general tendencies of their segment (demographic or other) becomes irrelevant. In fact, as in this case (and as I explored in more detail in this earlier blog post), these ‘unlikely’ converters often prove to be surprisingly strong performers.
