We were burning through ad spend targeting demographics that looked perfect on paper but weren’t converting.
Switched to psychographic segments based on user behavior patterns and motivations instead of just age and location.
CTR improved 40% and CPA dropped by half within two weeks.
User actions reveal real intent. Demographics are just guessing.
This is exactly why I stopped using broad demographic targeting for my campaigns.
Now I focus on tracking what users actually do after they download. The ones who subscribe usually follow specific patterns that have nothing to do with their age or where they live.
Building audiences around these behaviors gives me much better quality users who actually stick around and pay.
Same thing happened to us. Demographics look good but the wrong people click. Behavior data takes more work but actually works.
Behavior beats demographics every time. Age and location tell you nothing about what drives someone to buy. I’ve seen apps waste thousands targeting 25-35 year olds in major cities when their real buyers were motivated by specific pain points, not life stage. The key is tracking which actions predict conversion. Users who complete onboarding vs those who skip steps. People who engage with certain features first. Then you build lookalike audiences from those behavioral patterns instead of surface level demographics.
Had a similar breakthrough with a meditation app. We kept targeting stressed professionals in their 30s because that’s what made sense logically.
Turns out our best users were people who opened the app during specific times of day and used the breathing exercises first. Age didn’t matter at all.
Once we started targeting based on app usage patterns instead of job titles, our retention went up 60%. The people we found actually needed what we were selling.