[Video] How and Why to Split Gender in Google Ads

So today I’m going to discuss the topic of gender in Google Ads and how to separate your campaigns into men and women. Why you’d want to do that and essentially how to get away with that from a Google Ads perspective. How to make sure that you’re not breaking any rules that Google Ads might have in place when it comes to doing this.

Alright, so first of all, why would we want to separate campaigns into men and women in the first place?

If you are selling a product or a service where the gender has a marked difference in how they use the product or have a — what kind of messaging would be appealing to them, then it’s a good idea to actually separate the campaigns into male versus women because then you can actually address the needs of the target population that you are working with.

So for example, let’s say you’re doing display campaign and you are selling something that men and women will want to purchase separately such as clothing. Now, as you know there are plenty of clothing stores out there that cater to just men or women, but then there are also clothing stores out there that cater to both.

But if you are one of those ones that cater to both, you want to be showing pictures of men wearing clothing to men and women wearing clothing to women because men aren’t really that interested in looking at women’s wear and vice versa. So that’s one obvious example where you might want to split the campaign into male and female.

Then there’s also situations where the product or service in question is very typically used by one gender or another and maybe is purchased by the other as a gift. So one example of that might be men’s shaving products.

For example, you may find that men are purchasing shaving products for themselves and women may be purchasing shaving products for their spouse. Especially if these shaving products are branded specifically to be male shaving products rather than unisex or female shaving products. That shaving product is one area where they certainly tend to brand that for who they’re trying to target.

Another example again maybe things like day spas. It tends to be a primarily female audience going to day spas but you do tend to have men purchasing this as gifts and so the intentions behind the campaigns are different when targeting men versus women.

Alright, so I think you have an understanding of why you would want to do this, let’s switch over to Google Ads and I will show you how to actually set it up.

So now if we look over at Google Ads, what we need to do is to click on a particular campaign and then click over to demographics.

Now, what will happen is it will initially come up with age-related to different demographics but over here across the top, you can specify gender. Now, what it will do is it will show you all of the Ad groups for that particular campaign and it will list out the genders for all of them. So if you have one Ad group then you’ll have female, male and unknown. If you have two Ad groups, you’ll have two of each, etcetera, depending on how many Ad groups you have in that campaign.

Now, a word on unknown. “Unknown” is all the people that Google have not been able to categorize into a gender. So what we want to do with these people is we want to decide in advance— First of all, do we want to count unknowns?

You’ll probably find that unknown will make up to 30 to 40 percent of your audience so it’s a good idea to keep them as long as they meet other criteria that you need such as searching for the right key terms or having the right interest.

So, first of all, you need to consider, are you going to keep the unknowns and if you are going to keep the unknowns, are you going to count them as male or a female? So you need to make that decision first but then you will want to click over to the gender that you do not want to include in this campaign.

Let’s say we’re having a male-only campaign and we’re treating the unknowns as females, then we’ll want to select female and we’ll want to select unknown and then you want to click over here on to edit and we want to choose exclude from Ad group.

What will happen is it will come through it as red over here and it will say excluded from Ad group. Meanwhile, the campaign will still continue to the specified gender that you wanted to include.

Now at this point, it’s probably worthwhile duplicating the campaign so that you can also have another one for the other gender.

So to do that, we want to go over to the campaign. Okay, so you want to click on search campaigns or display campaign, whichever one it and then that will bring up campaigns in here, and you can choose your campaign from the list and you can just click in this square here and you can go to copy, okay, and then you can now go to edit and paste and you can add a new campaign that way. So that’s just gonna copy all of the details.

Alright, so you now got the second one. Go into that campaign and go to demographics, gender and now you want to enable the ones that you had excluded and disable the ones that were not in the campaign.

Alright, that’s how to do it functionally but one thing that we might want to consider is — are there any problems with doing this and yes, there can be problems with doing this if what you are doing is targeting a gender for the purpose of discrimination.

So basically, what I mean by that is if you don’t want to be excluding a particular gender from an opportunity that should really be an opportunity available to everybody. It’s one thing to separate males and women from something like men’s shaving products especially if you still want to target women anyway and let them have it as gifts.

But it’s one thing to do that but it’s something different entirely if you are promoting an educational opportunity and you’re only targeting males. That would — that would definitely fall under a discrimination policy because essentially you are excluding a group who would be an interested party to that particular type of service.

So if you are not sure whether splitting by gender is acceptable in your industry then — suddenly you don’t have to exclude, you don’t have to exclude any genders. There’s no reason why you must do this but if you felt that having different messaging based on the gender wasn’t really helpful then I would suggest keeping both genders in but having different campaigns for them and just making sure that none of the wording that you have implied that a particular gender should not take part in that opportunity.

It’s more that you would update the messaging in line with what that gender will most likely find appealing.

So hopefully that makes sense. If not, I am happy to clarify in another video but give me feedback as to whether that makes sense or not. Obviously, topics of discrimination is one where you want to check carefully and make sure that — basically, you wanna make sure that you’re not doing the wrong thing and discriminating against people in your advertising. End of story.

It’s one of those areas where you can be nuance because what one person might consider messaging, someone else might consider highly offensive.

So alrighty, now if you would like to get more tips like this, then you can reach out to me and subscribe to my newsletter. You can do that by going to my website at www.petramanos.com and find the subscribe option which should be written across the top. If you subscribe to that one, you should get several times a week, you’ll get some tips like this one as to how to use your analytics and your Google Ads to get better results from your campaigns.

Alright, I hope you have a wonderful day today. Bye!