Geo, gender, language, and age targeting

X is a global product, but at times you may want to focus on people in specific locations or who speak certain languages to achieve your business goals. Whether your ideal customers are located down the street, across the country, or around the world, Twitter’s geo-targeting enables you to reach the audience that best fits the scope of your business and its aspirations.

Together with age and gender targeting, these core demographic targeting options help you find your audience on X.

These are subtractive, or "AND" targeting types, which means that whatever you set for geo location, gender, language, and age will all be respected in your campaigns.

 

Geo location targeting

Advertisers can target their campaigns to specific geographies: countries, regions, metros, cities, postal codes, or a radius around a location. 

You can specify your location targeting during campaign setup:

  1. Navigate to the "Targeting" section of campaign setup
  2. Scroll to "Demographics" section
  3. Within the "Location" section, input the geo location(s) you'd like to target. You can target by countries, regions, metros, cities, or postal codes.
  4. Alternatively, you can target a radius of 1 mile to 50 miles around a location by navigating to the “Radius around a location” tab and entering a specific location and a radius.

Note: Radius Targeting is currently only available for accounts in the US and Japan. To gain access to Radius Targeting, please reach out to your account manager.

Your ads will show to all locations selected, even if they're from the same geography. For example, if you choose to target your campaign to the United States and California, your ads will show to everyone in the United States. If you want only to target individual regions, be sure to only add those regions as targeting criteria to your campaign.

Note: Self-serve advertisers are limited to targeting users in countries where the Twitter Ads product is available, and not all of the countries listed in the geo locations index. For a list of countries available for targeting, please see this article.

X’s geo targeting is based on someone’s recent location. This is a combination of current location and recent location history. X uses several signals - including IP address and GPS signal - for determining whether someone is in a particular geographic location. These signals inform sophisticated machine-learned models that predict a user’s location. More on X’s data collection for ads

What if the location I'm trying to target isn't available?

If the location you enter does not populate, we recommend adding the closest region or area to target. Some countries do not have as granular targeting options (metro, postal code, region) available at this time. 

Why am I seeing impressions served outside my geo location targeting?

Make sure you didn't alter your campaign targeting post-launch. You can do this by clicking into your campaign and click the "History" tab. This will show the dates and times you made changes to your campaign. If you add geo location targeting post-launch, impressions would be served all over the world during that intial time of serve.

Additionally, you may notice that in some instances, the sum of all locations does not account for all of the campaign spend. This is due to the small attribution loss we experience when breaking out billing and targeting data. Please note that every ad impression has in fact served to your targeting specifications, but there is a 1-3% loss in the segmented spend data we display in the dashboard. We apologize for any inconvenience this causes. 

 

 

Gender targeting

You can select if you'd like to serve to any gender, Males, or Females in your campaign. 

To make this selection:

  1. Navigate to "Targeting" > "Demographics"
  2. Choose the gender option you want to target
  3. The selected option will appear blue

We use the gender provided by people in their profiles, and extend that data to other people based on factors of account likeness to determine the gender of people haven't manually entered their preferred gender.

 

 

Language targeting

This targeting option gives advertisers the ability to reach people based on the language(s) that they understand. We derive a person’s language from a number of different sources - including the language selected in their profile settings and the languages that correspond to their activity on X. If we infer that a person understands multiple languages, they will be targetable by each language. 

To target a language:

  1. Navigate to "Demographics" in the targeting section of campaign setup

  2. Click into the search box under the "Language" header

  3. Search or scroll through the options and click the checkbox next to any languages that you want to target

If selecting more than one language, you will be targeting people who understand at least one of the languages chosen. For example, if you select English and French, your campaign will serve to people who understand English or French. 

We currently offer 46 different languages to choose from:

  • Albanian

  • Arabic

  • Basque

  • Bengali

  • Bulgarian

  • Catalan

  • Chinese (Simplified)

  • Croatian

  • Czech

  • Danish

  • Dutch

  • English

  • Farsi

  • Finnish

  • French

  • Galician

  • German

  • Greek

  • Gujarati

  • Hebrew

  • Hindi

  • Hungarian

  • Indonesian

  • Irish

  • Italian

  • Japanese

  • Kannada

  • Korean

  • Latvian

  • Malay

  • Marathi

  • Norwegian

  • Norwegian Bokmål

  • Polish

  • Portuguese

  • Romanian

  • Russian

  • Serbian

  • Slovak

  • Spanish

  • Swedish

  • Tamil

  • Thai

  • Turkish

  • Ukrainian

  • Urdu

 

Age targeting

We have a number of age buckets that you can target. Some buckets are available globally, while others are only available if you're targeting Japan. 

We collect age data based on the birthdates people have entered on their X profile. Then we extend our age inference to other X users who may not have provided X with their birthday, based on a number of attributes such as the accounts they follows and their interests. Learn more.

To target an age group: 

  1. Navigate to "Targeting" > "Demographics"
  2. Under the "Select an Age" section, you can choose "All ages" or "Age range"
  3. If you're setting an age range, choose the bucket you'd like to target

Note: If you're targeting any geo-location outside of Japan, you will not be able to use an age bucket marked "Japan only". 

The age segments available for global targeting are:

  • 13-24
  • 13-34
  • 13-49
  • 13-54
  • 13+
  • 18-24
  • 18-34
  • 18-49
  • 18-54
  • 18+
  • 21-34
  • 21-49
  • 21-54
  • 21+
  • 25-49
  • 25-54
  • 25+
  • 35-49
  • 35-54
  • 35+
  • 50+
 

Serving your campaigns

Geo location, gender, language, and age targeting are all subtractive, or "AND", targeting types. This means that all the parameters you set for these targeting types will be respected.

For example, if you choose United States + Males + 18 and up, your campaign impressions will only serve to males 18 + up who are in the United States. Even if you add on additional targeting, such as keyword or interest targeting, only 18 and up males in United States who also meet your keyword or interest targeting will be eligible to be served the ad. 

Geo location, gender, language, and age targeting all help you be precise in who you're serving ads to. However, because they're "AND" targeting types, each one you layer on decreases the audience size your campaign can serve to. It's important to make sure your other targeting types are sufficiently large enough so that your campaign doesn't struggle to serve to users. 

 

 

Viewing your results

You can view your campaigns' audience breakdown by locations, keywords, handles, behaviors, gender, language, platform, and interests.

First, click into a campaign and navigate to the "Audience" tab to view audience details. To export data at the audience level, click on the "Export" button on this page.

Note: when viewing your campaign by age, language, geo location, and gender targeting, you will usually see a lower number of total impressions, engagements, or spend on the top-line campaign level than when you add up all of the individual ones listed below. This is because if a single person views your campaign and fits into multiple categories, their engagement and impression will be counted under both. 

For example, if you target the age bucket 18 and up, your campaign will be served to users who fit into the age bucket 18 and up. However, the impression served to someone who fits in the 18 and up bucket might also fit into the 13 and up bucket. Their single impression will be reported in both the 18 and up and 13 and up rows. Your ads will not be served to people who don't have the targeted criteria you selected. You're only charged once, if the person makes the billable action and is within your targeting parameters. 

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