{"id":1237,"date":"2026-10-05T06:33:44","date_gmt":"2026-10-05T10:33:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thedoctorads.com\/blog\/google-ads-age-targeting-unknown-age"},"modified":"2026-10-05T06:33:44","modified_gmt":"2026-10-05T10:33:44","slug":"google-ads-age-targeting-unknown-age","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thedoctorads.com\/blog\/google-ads-age-targeting-unknown-age","title":{"rendered":"Unknown Age Takes 28.8% of Google Ads Spend. Should You Exclude It?"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"tldr\">\n<p><strong>TL;DR abstract.<\/strong> How much Google Ads money goes to people whose age Google does not know, and should you exclude them? Doctor Ads Profit Forensics read the age report of large-spend accounts audited between 2024 and 2026. In the median account <strong><span data-claim-id=\"AG-01\">28.8%<\/span><\/strong> of spend went to the Unknown age group, and no account was below 16.8%. Inside the same account, a conversion from Unknown cost a median <strong><span data-claim-id=\"AG-03\">1.09<\/span><\/strong> times a conversion from the known ages: the click was cheaper and the conversion rate lower. Unknown was dearer in about three accounts in four and cheaper in the rest.<\/p>\n<p>Among the known ages the pattern runs one way: younger groups converted cheaper than the account average and older groups dearer, with 65 and over the dearest group in more than half the accounts. The older groups converted better per click but paid more for the click. Every age group, Unknown included, received impressions in every account. On these medians, excluding Unknown would remove about 27% of conversions to lower the account&#8217;s average cost per conversion by about 2.4%.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"key-stat\">\n<p><strong>In the median Google Ads account, 28.8% of spend went to people whose age Google reports as Unknown, and a conversion from that group cost 1.09 times a conversion from the known ages inside the same account.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p class=\"source-line\">Method basis: the age report of each audited account, one export per account between 2024 and 2026; shares and cost ratios computed inside each account and summarised by the median. Source: Doctor Ads Profit Forensics.<\/p>\n<\/aside>\n<p>The age report in Google Ads has seven rows, and one of them is not an age. &#8220;Unknown&#8221; is where Google puts everyone it cannot place. The advice about that row comes in two flavours. One says it is low-quality traffic and should be excluded. The other says it is a big slice of real people and must never be touched. Neither usually comes with a number.<\/p>\n<p>Google&#8217;s own <a href=\"https:\/\/support.google.com\/google-ads\/answer\/2580383\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">help page on demographic targeting<\/a> takes a middle line: &#8220;Exclude the &#8216;Unknown&#8217; demographic category only if you&#8217;re sure you want to restrict your campaign to a narrow audience.&#8221; Its <a href=\"https:\/\/support.google.com\/sa360\/answer\/12025344\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Search Ads 360 page<\/a> adds a detail the main page leaves out: audience members under 18 are reported in the Unknown age group. Practitioners agree that the row is large. <a href=\"https:\/\/thescienceofppc.com\/40\/whats-going-on-with-unknown-ppc-demographic-segments\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Andrew Goodman<\/a> writes that Unknown &#8220;tends to be the largest of the segments&#8221;; <a href=\"https:\/\/keepersdigital.com\/en-us\/resources\/paid-search\/demographic-targeting-google-ads\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">a Keepers Digital guide<\/a> puts it at 20% to 40% of impressions without saying where the range comes from.<\/p>\n<p>The closest measurement we found is a 2019 study by <a href=\"https:\/\/twooctobers.com\/blog\/search-ad-ctrs-by-age\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Two Octobers<\/a> of fifty US advertisers, which compared click-through rate by age and found Unknown the lowest, at 6.97% against 7.38% to 8.18% for the known groups. It did not look at spend or at conversions. <a href=\"https:\/\/www.ppc-strategist.co.uk\/unknowns-demographic-data\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Phil Taylor<\/a> notes that Unknown &#8220;often turns out to have a meaningfully different conversion rate&#8221; from the known groups, without a figure. Nobody we found reports how much money sits in Unknown across accounts, or what a conversion from it costs against the same account&#8217;s other ages. Those are the two numbers we counted.<\/p>\n<h2>Almost three dollars in ten go to an age Google does not know<\/h2>\n<p>For each account we summed the age report over its export window and divided the Unknown row by the total. In the median account Unknown took <strong><span data-claim-id=\"AG-01\">28.8%<\/span><\/strong> of spend, with the middle half of accounts between 23.8% and 33.0%. Leaving out any one account moves the median by less than a quarter of a point. The lowest share in the sample was 16.8% and the highest 51.0%. Pooled across all the money in the sample it is 27.9%, and 27.5% without the largest account, so no single advertiser drives the figure.<\/p>\n<figure class=\"chart\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/thedoctorads.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/tda-w12-age-unknown-share.png\" alt=\"Share of each account&#039;s spend in the Unknown age group: more than half of accounts between 25% and 35%, about one in six between 15% and 20%, about one in seven between 20% and 25%, very few between 35% and 40% and about one in ten at 40% or more; median 28.8%.\" title=\"\"><figcaption><strong>The Unknown-Age Share.<\/strong> Distribution across accounts of the spend share in Unknown age. Source: Doctor Ads Profit Forensics.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>Measured in spend, Unknown was the largest single row of the report in <span data-claim-id=\"AG-08\">about seven accounts in ten<\/span>. The next largest row, 25 to 34, took a median 21.0%.<\/p>\n<h2>Unknown&#8217;s share shrinks from impressions to clicks to conversions<\/h2>\n<p>The row shrinks as you move down the funnel. In the median account Unknown held <strong><span data-claim-id=\"AG-02\">33.6%<\/span><\/strong> of impressions, 30.8% of clicks and 27.3% of conversions; the click share uses only the exports that carry click data. That ordering matches the lower click-through rate Two Octobers found in 2019. Unknown is shown a lot and clicked a little less often, and in these accounts it also converted a little less often again.<\/p>\n<h2>A conversion from Unknown costs about 9% more<\/h2>\n<p>Conversions are set up differently in every account, so we never compare one account&#8217;s cost per conversion with another&#8217;s. Inside each account we divided the cost per conversion of Unknown by the cost per conversion of all known ages together, keeping accounts with at least 30 conversions and 100 clicks on both sides.<\/p>\n<p>The median ratio was <strong><span data-claim-id=\"AG-03\">1.09<\/span><\/strong>, with the middle half of accounts between 1.02 and 1.18. Unknown was dearer in about three accounts in four and cheaper in the remaining quarter. It was at least 20% dearer in about one account in five. The mechanism is two opposite moves of similar size: the Unknown click was cheaper, a median <strong><span data-claim-id=\"AG-03b\">0.84<\/span><\/strong> of the known-age click, and its conversion rate lower, at 0.80. Each ratio is a median taken on its own across accounts, so the two do not multiply out to the 1.09.<\/p>\n<figure class=\"chart\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/thedoctorads.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/tda-w12-age-unknown-cpa.png\" alt=\"Cost per conversion of the Unknown age group divided by the known ages inside each account: about a quarter of accounts below 1.0, more than half between 1.0 and 1.2 and about one in five at 1.2 or more; median 1.09.\" title=\"\"><figcaption><strong>Unknown costs a little more, not a lot.<\/strong> Unknown against known ages inside each account. Source: Doctor Ads Profit Forensics.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<h2>Search campaigns show the same Unknown share<\/h2>\n<p>One explanation for a large Unknown row is that it comes from display and video placements, on the theory that viewers there are less often signed in to a Google account. If that were the whole story, Search campaigns alone should show a small Unknown share. They do not. Counting only Search campaigns, Unknown took <strong><span data-claim-id=\"AG-04\">29.7%<\/span><\/strong> of spend in the median account, and its cost per conversion ratio rose to 1.13, dearer in about eight accounts in ten. Unknown is at least as much a Search phenomenon as a display or video one.<\/p>\n<h2>Younger groups convert more cheaply, older groups more dearly<\/h2>\n<p>To compare the known ages we set each group&#8217;s cost per conversion against the same account&#8217;s average across all ages. Below 1 means the group converted more cheaply than the account as a whole.<\/p>\n<figure class=\"chart\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/thedoctorads.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/tda-w12-age-cpa-index.png\" alt=\"Cost per conversion of each age group against the same account&#039;s average, median account: 18 to 24 0.93, 25 to 34 0.93, 35 to 44 0.96, 45 to 54 1.03, 55 to 64 1.10, 65 and over 1.12, Unknown 1.07.\" title=\"\"><figcaption><strong>Younger groups convert more cheaply, older groups more dearly.<\/strong> Cost per conversion index by age group, median account. Source: Doctor Ads Profit Forensics.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>The median index runs <strong><span data-claim-id=\"AG-05\">0.93<\/span><\/strong> for 18 to 24, 0.93 for 25 to 34, 0.96 for 35 to 44, 1.03 for 45 to 54, 1.10 for 55 to 64 and 1.12 for 65 and over. Against that same account average, Unknown sits at 1.07, a little under the 1.09 against the known ages alone, because Unknown is part of the average. The older groups are not worse at converting. Their conversion rate index is higher, a median <strong><span data-claim-id=\"AG-05b\">1.12<\/span><\/strong> for both 55 to 64 and 65 and over, but their clicks cost more, a median 1.24 and 1.23 of the account average, against 0.81 for the youngest group. In these accounts the older groups&#8217; clicks cost more than their extra conversions make up for.<\/p>\n<h2>The cheapest age changes from account to account<\/h2>\n<p>The medians hide real variety. Among accounts with enough conversions in at least four known age groups, the cheapest group was 18 to 24 in <strong><span data-claim-id=\"AG-06\">nearly half<\/span><\/strong> of them, and the dearest was 65 and over in more than half. The rest spread across the other groups. In the median account the dearest age group cost 1.33 times the cheapest, with the middle half of accounts between 1.15 and 1.67. That spread is what age settings can work with, and it is account-specific.<\/p>\n<h2>Every age group still received impressions<\/h2>\n<p>Every age group, Unknown included, <strong><span data-claim-id=\"AG-07\">received impressions in every account<\/span><\/strong> we checked. The report cannot show exclusions set on some campaigns but not others, so this does not prove that nobody excluded an age anywhere. It shows only that each age group, Unknown included, was shown ads at some point during the export window in every account.<\/p>\n<h2>Should you exclude Unknown?<\/h2>\n<p>Run the medians through simple arithmetic. If Unknown takes 28.8% of spend at 1.09 times the known-age cost per conversion, then removing it, with no other change, would remove about 27% of the account&#8217;s conversions and lower the average cost per conversion by <span data-claim-id=\"AG-09\">about 2.4%<\/span>. That is an illustration on the medians, not a measured result, and it assumes the money would simply not be spent. It shows the trade: a large cut in volume for a small gain in efficiency.<\/p>\n<p>There is also the under-18 detail from Google&#8217;s documentation. If your product cannot be sold to minors, part of Unknown is people you cannot serve, which is a reason to look at your own ratio rather than at ours. How you act depends on bidding. Under manual bidding, if your own Unknown ratio stays above 1.2 over more than one period, a negative bid adjustment on Unknown is a more measured step than an exclusion. In our windows about one account in five sat above 1.2; we did not measure how long that lasts. Under Smart Bidding, Google&#8217;s <a href=\"https:\/\/support.google.com\/google-ads\/answer\/2732132\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">bid adjustment page<\/a> says that &#8220;if you make a manual bid adjustment to your automated Smart Bidding strategy, it won&#8217;t be supported&#8221;, so the only age lever left is exclusion, and it is worth testing as an experiment rather than switching on account-wide. A similar question, how Google classifies who sees your ads, sits behind our study of <a href=\"https:\/\/thedoctorads.com\/blog\/google-ads-location-presence-vs-interest\">location targeting by presence or interest<\/a>, and the same method applied to gender and household income is in <a href=\"https:\/\/thedoctorads.com\/blog\/google-ads-gender-income-targeting\">our measurement of the women-to-men cost ratio<\/a>.<\/p>\n<h2>When this does not apply<\/h2>\n<p><strong>Your buyers are a narrow age band.<\/strong> These accounts sell mostly online subscription services and online education to broad audiences. A business that sells only to retirees or only to students will see a different gradient.<\/p>\n<p><strong>You have few conversions.<\/strong> The ratios here need at least 30 conversions on each side. Below that, one good week can flip an age group from cheapest to dearest.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Your conversions are not the sale.<\/strong> If you count leads that convert to customers at different rates by age, the cost per conversion in the age report is not the cost per customer. Import the outcome before you act on age.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Your account runs mostly on Performance Max.<\/strong> In these exports most of the money in the age report came from Search campaigns. An account built on Performance Max may show a different picture.<\/p>\n<h2>How to check yours in five minutes<\/h2>\n<ol>\n<li>In Google Ads, open Audiences, then Demographics, then Age, for the last six to twelve months.<\/li>\n<li>Divide the cost of the Unknown row by total cost. If it sits between about a fifth and a third, you look like these accounts.<\/li>\n<li>Divide Unknown&#8217;s cost per conversion by the cost per conversion of the six known rows together. A result between 1.0 and 1.2 is typical.<\/li>\n<li>Do the same for each known age against the account total. If one group sits more than 20% above the account average for two periods in a row, that is our rule of thumb, not a tested threshold, for running a test: a bid adjustment under manual bidding, an experiment under Smart Bidding.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<h2>Key takeaways<\/h2>\n<ul>\n<li>In the median account <strong>28.8%<\/strong> of spend went to the Unknown age group; no account was below 16.8%.<\/li>\n<li>Inside the account a conversion from Unknown cost <strong>1.09<\/strong> times a conversion from the known ages together: a cheaper click and a lower conversion rate.<\/li>\n<li>The share and the ratio hold in Search campaigns alone (29.7% and 1.13).<\/li>\n<li>Younger groups converted more cheaply than the account average and older groups more dearly; older searchers convert better but their clicks cost more.<\/li>\n<li>On the medians, excluding Unknown trades about 27% of conversions for a 2.4% lower average cost per conversion.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><!-- cta-anchor --><\/p>\n<h2>Researcher&#8217;s take<\/h2>\n<p>Unknown is the row people want to switch off, because it looks like a blind spot. In these accounts it is almost a third of the business and only slightly more expensive than the rest. On the simple arithmetic, cutting it buys a small efficiency gain for a large loss of volume; a real exclusion can shift costs elsewhere in the account, so test it before you trust that sum. The more useful line in the age report is the gradient across the known groups, and it differs by account. Read your own ratios for two periods before you move anything, and prefer a bid change to a switch where your bidding allows it; under Smart Bidding, test an exclusion before you keep it.<\/p>\n<p><em>Igor Ivitskiy, Doctor Ads \u00b7 19 years \u00b7 $770M managed spend<\/em><\/p>\n<h2>Method<\/h2>\n<p><em><a href=\"https:\/\/thedoctorads.com\/profit-forensics\">Doctor Ads Profit Forensics<\/a> is the research desk of a Google Ads practice with 19 years and $770M managed spend behind it.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Data statement v.2026.10. Source: the age report (age range and demographic status by campaign and ad group) exported during Doctor Ads audits of large-spend Google Ads accounts, one export per account. Export windows run from about two weeks to about five and a half months between August 2024 and February 2026; a few accounts were exported for their whole history. Where an account has two reports, the one with the latest dated window is used, and a whole-history report only where no dated window exists. The accounts hold about $96 million of spend in those windows. Most sell online subscription services and online education. Accounts are pseudonymised; no account, campaign or niche name is published beyond that coarse class.<\/p>\n<p>Definitions. Shares are each row&#8217;s spend, impressions, clicks or conversions divided by the account total over its window; accounts enter with at least $1,000 of spend. Ratios compare Unknown with all known ages together, or each age group with the account&#8217;s all-age figure, inside one account, and require at least 30 conversions and 100 clicks on both sides of the comparison. The cheapest and dearest groups are read among accounts with at least four known age groups passing that threshold. Search-only figures keep campaigns whose type is Search in the same export. Demographic status was Enabled for almost all spend. A few exports carry spend and conversions but no clicks, so click shares and click-cost ratios use fewer accounts than spend and conversion shares.<\/p>\n<p>Weighting. The figures are medians across accounts; each median is also recomputed leaving one account out at a time, as a stability check. Conversions are never pooled across accounts; the only pooled figure is the Unknown share of spend. Medians and quartiles use one engine with linear interpolation. The exclusion arithmetic combines the median share and the median cost ratio and is labelled as an illustration.<\/p>\n<p>Limitations. Four. Export windows differ between accounts, so seasonal effects are not aligned. The sample is skewed towards large online subscription and education advertisers, and that age mix is particular to those businesses. Conversions follow each account&#8217;s settings and may not be sales. And nothing here is causal: a cheaper age group in the report is not proof that more budget there would convert at the same cost.<\/p>\n<p>Changelog. First published October 2026. Recomputed quarterly against the live claim registry.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In the median Google Ads account, 28.8% of spend went to people whose age Google reports as Unknown, and a conversion from them cost 1.09 times a known-age conversion. Younger groups converted cheaper than the account average and older groups dearer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":1236,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1237","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-audiences-and-targeting","generate-columns","tablet-grid-50","mobile-grid-100","grid-parent","grid-33"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thedoctorads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1237","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thedoctorads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thedoctorads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thedoctorads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1237"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thedoctorads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1237\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thedoctorads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1236"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thedoctorads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1237"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thedoctorads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1237"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thedoctorads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1237"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}