In this tutorial Aaron Young walks viewers through the data Google collects on users via adsettings.google.com and shows how marketers can turn that data into a competitive advantage. After a brief, opinionated intro about ad‑targeting and privacy, he demonstrates his own ad‑settings profile, highlighting age, gender, interests, travel plans, and family demographics. He then explains how to apply audience and demographic signals across three Google Ads campaign types: Search campaigns – use the Audiences tab with the observation setting, add dozens of audience lists, monitor clicks/impressions, and apply bid adjustments (or exclusions) based on cost‑per‑conversion and impression‑share thresholds. He also discusses integrating demographic bid modifiers. Shopping campaigns – employ both observation and targeted audience methods, focus on similar‑audience and cart‑abandoner lists, use negative bid adjustments for under‑performing audiences, and treat shopping as a remarketing channel. Display campaigns – structure ad groups around audience segments (similar, affinity, converters, cart abandoners) rather than keywords, allowing easy pausing of low‑performing groups and leveraging higher conversion rates for affinity/similar audiences. Throughout, he stresses the importance of not ignoring Google’s audience data, ties the tactics to measurable metrics (clicks, conversions, CPC, cost‑per‑conversion, impression share), and promotes his paid "10x Google Ads" community where he offers master‑classes, live coaching, and Q&A support. The video ends with a call‑to‑action to join the community.
Chapters
I could confidently say that all of us have had this situation happen to us before. We're sitting around with friends one day talking about a random subject, like the best type of kitty litter to use, even if you don't have a cat. And then all of a sudden, over the next couple of days and weeks, you're seeing ads about kitty litter once again. You've never searched this before. You don't even own a cat. But now, everywhere you look, you're seeing ads about kitty litter. And despite all of the denials from companies like Google, the reality is, is that they are always collecting data about you, especially what you're searching and how you're interacting with the Internet and your connected devices. Now, there are two main types of people when they hear this news. Firstly, there are those people who are absolutely enraged and angry about this, that this is an invasion of their privacy. So it learns information about me. Seems like an invasion of privacy. Dude, if you think that's bad, go to Google Earth and type in your address. Although then there's a second group of people which is more like me, that you just really don't care. And my view on this is that unless you're an undercover agent, a spy, or going out there and actively doing something illegal, who really cares if someone is monitoring your search history? Now, that's not a discussion that I want to get into today, so please don't bombard my comment section with different theories because. Because one of the advantages that I do see in this type of activity being undertaken is that I kind of like the fact that if I'm talking about something or that if I do a search for something, then I can't remember what I was searching for. I no doubt see some ads when I'm doing just a normal web browse over the coming days and weeks, which would then jog my memory to purchase that product that I actually need or that service that I'm interested in trying out. So in this video, I want to take you through what what Google actually knows about you, but more importantly, how you can use this information and incorporate it in your Google Ads campaigns so that you can increase the profit and the sales that your Google Ads campaigns are getting. So firstly, let's start with what does Google actually know about you? And if you'd like to find out, after you watch this video, I want you to go through and do a quick search and visit the URL adsettings.google.com Let's go take a look right now. So remember, we want to go to adsettings.google.com and then this will bring up the information which Google has about you. Now, when you can see with for my profile, you can see that is correct. Yes. I am between 35 to 44 years old. I know, shocking many of you thought that I was much younger than that. Obviously I'm a male. And then we start going through all of these other information points is that I am interested in air travel at the moment. And that's because now that our borders have opened in Australia, I'm looking at doing some travel. I've been getting into some fishing lately. That's why we're looking more at some boats and different boating options. And at the moment we're also looking at some different holiday destinations that we could potentially go through. Once again, it knows that I'm married. I'm interested in marketing and it's also showing some of the different sports and interests that my kids have through here. So I'm doing some different web searches for them. For advertisers who are using this audience and demographic data correctly in their campaigns, it allows you to add another level to your marketing. Because one of the big misunderstandings with Google Ads is that many people are still stuck believing that with your Google Ads campaigns you can only target people who are by keywords. And yes, it is true that Google Ads was built upon keyword searches. But throughout the years Google has added more and more data points like the ones I just showed you in that ad setting site so that you can now also target people not only by keywords, but also by audiences, their demographics and their locations. And this is what I want to take you through right now. How can you as a business use this audience and demographic data to better optimize and target your your Google search, shopping and display campaigns? And right now I'm going to take you through a screen share showing you how I use audiences in these three different types of campaigns. Now I will give a little warning this will be a longer screen share but it's going to be so valuable especially when you start putting it all together at the end. So please make sure you stay around for this whole screen share. Let's go. The first type of campaign I want to take you through is for a search campaign and when you go into the search campaign you go into your audiences tab. Now what you can do with search campaigns is you've actually got to different options is that when it comes to adding in audiences, you can do this through the observation or the targeting method. Now for search campaigns I recommend using the observation method and not the targeting method. And I want to show you the reason for that. So the way that I build out my audience lists for search campaigns is that I'll go through and add multiple, sometimes even up to 50 or 60 different audiences. And what I'm looking for is I'm looking to see that the vast majority of my clicks and impressions come from the added segments or the audiences that I've added. Now for this campaign, I've got 260 clicks from my added audiences out of a total of 345. So that's just on 75%, which is sort of the baseline minimum. I like to get above 80%. So I need to go through and add a couple of more audiences for this campaign. And then what this allows me to do is this allows me to go through and add in some different bid optimizations and adjustments for the best performing audiences. Now, I do have smart bidding on this campaign and many people do ask that if, well, if you've got smart bidding, why do you worry about doing this? And I've just found that I've always gotten better results by manually pushing in these bid adjustments. It further increases the performance of my campaign. I've found with smart bidding like maximize conversions in that that's worked really, really well around getting my bid amounts right. So the cost per click and also increasing the budget when we see different periods of the day or days of the week when we're getting more search volume. And what I continue to do is I go through and add in some different bid adjustments. So increasing the bid adjustment, if I see that I'm getting a good cost per conversion, where I'm getting the cost per conversion which is at least meeting the campaign average or better than the campaign average. And while I've also got a search impression share which is well below 60%. And the reason for why I set 60% as the marker is because I've found that once we get above about 60 to 65% of that search impression share, the data just isn't as accurate. So what I go through and do is I add in the bid adjustments to increase the bidding on those different audiences. Now, if I ever get the situation, and this isn't the case in this account where you're seeing a high level of cost, so really high level of cost with no conversions, what I will do is I remove that audience from this added group and then I go through and add it as an exclusion. And then what that does is it stops Google from showing my ads to people within that audience group. And another option that you do have with search campaigns is you also get this data into the demographic level via age, gender, and also household income. And the main thing that I look through here is if I look to see where I've got a really high cost with also a really high cost per conversion. So you can see through here, I have gone through and added in some different bid adjustments. Probably one that I do need to review at the moment is this one in here, the 31 to 40% on the income. I'll go through and do that at a later date. But as you can see through here, we've gone through and added in a bid adjustment to this top 10. And the reason for that is because we're getting a good cost per conversion. And when I flip that over to the number of conversions, you can see that we've started to increase spend on this top 10% because it's been a really good performer for us. So that's the first way that you can use audiences and demographic data on your search campaigns. Now, when we move over to shopping campaigns, there's two different options that I do here with shopping campaigns is that in this shopping campaign, I've got it set as an observation method. And then I've got other shopping campaigns where I'm using a targeted method in that I only want our ads to appear to these audiences. So you can see through here we've got 22 clicks and all of them are coming from these added audiences. Now, I'm not going to spend too much time on this observation method because I very much just go through the same process of what I showed in the search campaign. The only thing that I would add is that with shopping campaigns, you don't get that demographic data, you only get that audience data. But I follow through the same process is that I'll go through. And with this one, because we can't add any exclusions, if I see any audiences that have a high cost with no conversions, I'll go through and I'll actually add in a negative bid adjustment and that then lowers the bids and also then means that our ads are not going to be appearing as much for those underperforming audiences. But then with shopping, what I will do is I'll build out a targeted audience and I'll be focusing this on two different groups of people. Firstly, these simple lists, so similar to all converters, and then also cart abandoners. So this allows me to retarget my shopping ads to people who are Similar to people who have converted or to people who have gone through, added our products to their cart and then abandoned the purchase at the last minute. And I find this to be a really successful way to use those audience and the demographic data that Google has collected. And you're using your shopping campaign as a remarketing campaign in that manner. And then finally, for my display campaigns, when I set up a display campaign, I will segment this campaign into four different ad groups based on audiences. So unlike in a search campaign where you'll build out your different ad groups based on keywords, with display campaigns, I build out my different ad groups based on audiences. And what I'll generally start with is I'll start with a similar audience. So once again, that's targeting those audiences which are similar to my current users. So my cart converters or my converters, I'll also generate another ad group around my affinity targeting. So this is Google audience set around these broad match ones. So for example, like running and walking, if you're selling some walking shoes or running shoes, you would target audiences around running and walking and health and fitness. And then I'll also set up those converters and those cart abandoners and then those remarketing audiences. And the reason for why I set this up like this is because by setting this into different ad groups, rather than just having it all in one big ad group, is I'm able to pause these different groups of audiences which are not converting. So you can see with this display campaign, our affinity and our similar audiences were converting really well at about half a percent, which is good for display campaign. And I was happy with this conversion data, but these other ones weren't converting. And a lot of the reason for that is we're getting more success with our shopping remarketing campaign. And that's how I go through and use the audience and demographic data that Google collects so that I can increase the performance on my Google search, shopping and display campaigns. And now that you know the type of data that Google has on you and also your customers and potential customers, I recommend that you don't waste that data and you start incorporating it into your Google Ads strategy and learning how to use and optimize that audience and demographic data that Google has so much of the right way so that we can improve the performance of your Google Ads campaigns is one of the large topic points that I have in my private Google Ads community, which I call the 10x Google Ads community, where we look to 10x your results. And that's because every single month in my Google Ads community, I give an advanced master class on how you can use Google Ads to drastically increase the performance of your campaigns. And that's all type of Google Ads campaigns from search, shopping, performance, max, display or video. I then also run a live group coaching and Q and A session. And what I will generally do in these sessions is I'll select four or five different campaigns from members within the community and we go through and do a live coaching on the strategies and the optimizations that I would implement into that campaign. And then I also make time to answer any questions that you have about your Google Ads campaign or just Google Ads in general. And then on top of all of that, you've got access to my private Google Ads Community feed where you can upload screenshots and ask questions about your own Google Ads accounts. And I come through and answer that as my priority. And on top of me giving you answers, you've also got support from community members from all over the world. So if you'd like to find out more information about my 10x Google Ads community, all you need to do is to follow that link in the description below and I hope to see you very, very soon in my 10x community. Once again, thank you for joining me. My name is Aaron Young from Define Digital Academy and I'm your 15,000 hour Google Ads Master. See you next time.
