How to exclude demographic segments

To provide a comprehensive and consolidated view of your audiences and make audience management and optimisation simpler, you’ll find the following improvements in Google Ads:

• New audience reporting
  Detailed reporting about audience demographics, segments and exclusions is now consolidated in one place. Click the campaigns icon and open the 'Audiences, keywords and content' tab, then click Audiences. You can also easily manage your audiences from this report page. Learn more about audience reporting.
• New terms
  We’re using new terms on your audience report and throughout Google Ads. For example, 'audience types' (these include custom, in-market and affinity) are now referred to as audience segments and 'remarketing' is now referred to as 'your data'. Learn more about the Updates to Audience terms and phrases.

Just as you can show your ads to people based on their age, gender and parental status, you can also exclude any of these specific demographic segments to make your advertising more efficient. This article shows you how to exclude selected demographic segments at the ad group level or at the campaign level.

Example

A female-only spa has a campaign that features the available services and hours for their spa centres. They're unable to serve male customers, so they decide to exclude the 'Male' category from this campaign. They could set the exclusion at the ad group level. But because the spa wants to apply these settings to all the ad groups in their campaign, they can make demographic exclusions at the campaign level instead of adding them one by one.

Instructions

You can modify demographic segment exclusions through the following 2 ways:

• In the 'Exclusions' section of a campaign's 'Audiences' page
• In the 'Demographics' table of a campaign's 'Audiences' page

In the 'Exclusions' section of a campaign's 'Audiences' page

1. In your Google Ads account, click the Campaigns icon .
2. Click the Audiences, keywords and content drop-down in the section menu and select Audiences.
3. Under the 'Exclusions' section, click Edit exclusions and select whether you want to update a campaign or ad group.
4. Select the campaign or ad group that you want to update.
5. In the 'Exclude audience segments' window, click on the Browse tab, and select the demographic segments that you want to exclude in the campaign or ad group.
6. Click Save.

In the 'Demographics' table of a campaign's 'Audiences' page

1. In your Google Ads account, click the Campaigns icon .
2. Click the Audiences, keywords and content drop-down in the section menu and select Audiences.
3. Click Show table under the 'Demographics' section. Then click More and select View exclusions.
4. Click the Exclude demographics icon .
5. Click Select a campaign , then choose the campaign you want to update.
6. Select the box next to the specific demographic segment that you want to exclude in the ad group.
7. Click Save.

Note: Excluding any demographic segment can significantly decrease the amount of traffic your ad group or campaign might receive. You can modify demographic segment exclusions through the following 2 ways:

Also, you can exclude people whose specific demographic traits we haven't identified by selecting the 'Unknown' segment. However, excluding it might prevent a substantial number of people from seeing your ads. Many sites within the Display Network don't provide demographic data for customers, and we aren't able to estimate demographic information from everyone using the web or mobile apps. This means that many people fall under the 'Unknown' demographic segment.

Related link

• About negative keywords
• Exclude specific webpages and videos
• Exclude pages about a specific topic
• About content suitability