Tearing a Page from MSN - Google Introduces Demographic Targeting.

Posted on January 24, 2008 
Filed Under Google AdWords, MSN Ad Centre, PPC News

Google announced today the ability to demographically target AdWords campaigns, much the same way MSN… well… sort of. First, this feature is in beta mode and will only be available to marketers in the US and UK over the “next few weeks”

Demographic bidding will be available to contextually targeted and placement-targeted campaigns on the content network. How does it work? Here is the direct quote from the Inside AdWords blog:

Some publishers in our network, such as social networking sites, know the gender and age of their users because their users sign in with that information when they create a profile or fill out registration or subscription forms. Participating publishers anonymize this user reported demographic data and then send it to Google in aggregate form, allowing us to adjust which ads are shown to members of specific demographic groups. (To protect user privacy, AdWords receives this data only from publishers that have permission from users to share their data according to the site’s terms and conditions. Users are never identified personally, but only as anonymous aggregated data in the demographic reports. And to protect the privacy of minors, users under 18 can’t be targeted demographically.)

I don’t have a lot of experience working with MSN’s demographic targeting, to be honest a lot of my clients just don’t lend themselves to that granular level of detail. Plus… I’m sceptical of how it works.

Regardless with Google’s beta test you will be able to modify your bids for a particular age bracket AND ask that your ads not be shown to a certain demographic groups if they aren’t meeting your ROI goals. This begs the question if at some point a cost-per-action system will be included in this.

This system is also supposed to help you determine which demographic converts best for you by giving you access to run a Demographic Reports from the report centre showing you a breakdown of your performance metrics based on demographic segmentation.

As a Canadian advertiser… I would like to test this out… but Google has always and will always continue to ignore us Canucks in the north shivering away in our igloos and the beta test is only available to US and UK advertisers. If you sign up for a test (which can be done here), let me know how it goes.

Comments

One Response to “Tearing a Page from MSN - Google Introduces Demographic Targeting.”

  1. Daniel on July 1st, 2008 9:31 am

    I read similar article also named a Page from MSN - Google Introduces Demographic Targeting | PPC Whiz, and it was completely different. Personally, I agree with you more, because this article makes a little bit more sense for me

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