PPCHow to target high-income consumers with AdWords

How to target high-income consumers with AdWords

Today I am going to be showing you a deeply hidden gem within AdWords that allows you to target people based on their household income.

There are many industries in which being able to target high net worth individuals is useful within AdWords.

Whether you are selling high-end investments, expensive cars, loans or clothes, targeting high-end individuals within AdWords will help you improve your return on investment.

Today I am going to be showing you a deeply hidden gem within AdWords that allows you to target people based on their household income. It works using data from Google that is sourced from this AdWords Help post.

“Target locations by demographics to reach groups of people based on their location’s approximate average household income. Based on publicly available data from the US Internal Revenue Service (IRS), advertisers are able to target ads to certain areas according to their average household income. This feature is currently available for U.S. locations only.”

You can target people by household incomes that are in:

  • Top 10%
  • 11-20%
  • 21-30%
  • 31-40%
  • Lower 50%

One of the issues however with targeting users by household income is that if you are using very granular targeting such as by city or zip code Google will respect this targeting over income targets.

So for example if you are targeting the whole of the USA with a household income target and then you target New York with a bid modifier of 20% then Google would respect the bid modifier for New York over the modifier for high income targets.

What percentage of traffic comes from each target bucket?

Early reports of the percentage of traffic from each target bucket have been published by bloggers. You will see that on average, users in the top 10% will have an income of $146,001 per year, with the bottom 50% having an income of less than $64,000 per year.

When looking at the percentage of clicks, 19.7% come from users with an average household income of $64,000 or less per year, with just 1.8% coming from households with an average income of $146,001 or more.

How To Target High Net Worth Individuals in Adwords

STEP 1. Go to your campaign settings along the top menu, and then select all settings from the sub menu as shown below.

A diagram showing the Settings tab, which sits between Ad groups and Ads, with a red arrow pointing to it. Below it is a tab labelled All settings, which sits next to Locations, Ad schedule and Devices.

STEP 2. Within the targeting options go to advanced targeting as shown in the screenshot below.

The screenshot shows a box labelled targeted locations with a list of different states to select from. Below it is a box which reads: Enter a location to target or exclude. Next to that is an Advanced search hyperlink, with a red arrow pointing to it.

STEP 3. In the advanced settings menu select location groups and then from the drop down select “demographics” as shown below.

STEP 4. Enter the location that you would like to target within the location box and then select the household income tier that you would like to target.

How to layer targeting methods to change bids

If you have a product which people from lower income households are likely to purchase, but a larger majority of your customers will be higher net worth individuals, you may want to consider using layered targeting.

For example, if I am targeting New York, I would add both New York as a location and then add New York (Top 10% by Income) as a location as shown below.

A grid of location targeting options. The top option reads New York, New York, United States with a bid adjustment value of -- and 0 clicks. The second option reads: Average household income, top 10% (US) within New York, New York, United States and has a bid adjustment value of +10%, with 0 clicks.

You can then use bid modifiers to appear higher in Google’s results for higher net worth individuals. You can see in the example that bids would be increased by 10% for higher net worth individuals. 

Conclusion

There are countless industries where this deeply hidden targeting feature will be very effective at improving your Adwords performance.

There are hundreds of different keywords that where the intention is dramatically changed when you compare the top 10% of earners with the bottom 50%. If you are targeting one of these markets, you should definitely consider testing this strategy.

If you have any questions about this feature please feel free to comment below with your questions.

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