Data: Marketers Struggle to Accurately Identify Moms

An analysis of over 4 billion U.S. consumer records from Q4 2024 by Truthset has revealed a significant challenge for marketers: While they can reliably determine a consumer’s gender, accurately identifying whether a woman is a mother or has children in the home remains a struggle. These findings, first reported by Ad Age, highlight a major hurdle for advertisers and brands aiming to target parents with relevant marketing campaigns.

• Data for female consumers is correct 83.9% of the time, and for male consumers, it’s accurate 82.2% of the time. 
• But when it comes to identifying whether a female has children present in the home, accuracy plummets to just 36.5%. For males, the accuracy drops even further to 28.7%. 
• Overall, the presence of children in a household is only correctly identified 42% of the time.
• Truthset’s analysis also found that the accuracy of this data degrades significantly when activated in media or matched to other data sources, dropping by up to 50% with each match process.

“Gender identification remains fairly reliable at the data provider level, but when it comes to determining parental status, accuracy is significantly lower,” Truthset noted. The findings are based on data collected from over 20 providers and truth-scored against billions of records.

For marketers, this lack of precision raises concerns about wasted ad spend and audience targeting issues. With parental status being a crucial factor for many campaigns — especially in industries like retail, consumer goods and education — the inability to confidently identify moms and dads could lead to significant inefficiencies.