Digital Media News

Demographic Targeting Using Age And Gender Data

Written by Myles Younger | May 29, 2014 3:30:00 PM

Demographic targeting continues to grow in popularity. A lot of clients want to use age and gender in their campaign targeting and want to find out more about these options. Dividing consumers into groups based on age and gender can greatly help advertisers determine their target audience for particular products and develop ads geared toward a specific demographic. With that in mind, it could be helpful to share additional details about how demographic targeting data is gathered, including a discussion around approximately how much impression inventory is available that contains demographic data.

While you can leverage your own data or third party data for demographic targeting, you can also take advantage of ExactDrive's advertising platform data under the Demographic tab. After you log into your account click on the advertiser then campaign of choice. Once the campaign details are displaying click on the "Show Advanced Features" link in the upper right-hand corner. This will expose the demographic targeting tab.Once exposed you can then select various age and gender data points to target for your campaign. Note: targeting parameters for income are displayed on the demographics page as well.

It is important to keep in mind that at the end of the day demographic data is limited to a subset of inventory because not all inventory partners send age and gender data during the ad call. That said, there is still a significant amount of available impression volume offered both in the United States and Internationally. However in order to maximize reach while still taking advantage of age and gender targeting, many clients opt to select the age buckets and genders they're interested in targeting, but also to include the "Allow Unknown" options. This will effectively target only impressions where the inventory partner tells us the user is *not* in a certain age group or of a specified gender. Note: age targeting has a minimum threshold of 13 and a maximum of 99.

Example Of Using "Allow Unknown" With Demographic Targeting

Imagine you have a campaign where you'd like to reach users that are male and 25+. While you can certainly target all age buckets 25+ and gender = male to achieve this, adding in "Allow Unknown" for both age and gender will prevent you from targeting impressions where the inventory partner tells ExactDrive that the user is female or younger than 25, while allowing you to buy impressions from inventory sources where that information is not available.

Demographic targeting can sometimes get a little complex. We hope this helps clarify ExactDrive's age and gender targeting capabilities a little more.