Wednesday, 1/23/2008

Google Adwords - Opens up Beta for Demographic "Demo" Targeting

Ever wish you could show your ads more often to a specific group like women aged 25-34? Want to see how your ads perform with certain demographic groups and then adjust your bids accordingly?

We're excited to introduce the new demographic bidding feature from AdWords. Demographic bidding helps you display your ads to specific gender and age group audiences on some sites in the Google content network, giving you more control over who your audience is and greater insight into how your ads perform with certain demographic groups.

We'll start testing this feature over the next few weeks with a selected group of advertisers in the U.S. and U.K. If you'd like to be part of that this group, read on.

Demographic bidding and reports are available to advertisers who run contextually targeted or placement-targeted campaigns (with CPC or CPM bidding) on certain sites in the Google content network.

Here's how it works: 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. See comments below:

(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.)

There are two ways you can use demographic bidding. First, you can modify your bids for a particular audience segment, such as increasing your bid for 25-34 year-old males by 230%. Second, you can ask that your ads not be shown to certain demographic groups if they aren't meeting your ROI goals.

If you're not sure which demographic converts best for you, you can run Demographic Reports (found in the Report Center) to guide your bids for certain groups. These reports can show you campaign performance metrics (including impressions, clicks, CTR, and conversion data) by the gender and age range of users who saw your ad. If there are demographic groups that convert well, you can increase your bids for those groups, increasing the frequency your ad will be shown to this audience. You can also choose to have your ad hidden from groups that don't respond well to your campaign.

If you're an AdWords advertiser located in the U.S. or the U.K., we'd like to invite you to try out demographic bidding. You can see which partner sites offer this feature and learn how to get started by visiting this site. We plan to add advertisers on a rolling basis. We'll let you know as soon as you've been added to the test.

Posted by Feng, Inside AdWords crew

Discovery comments:

Demo targeting is a fantastic feature for many advertisers, however the targeting is only as good as the people who allow themselves to be tracked. In this case Google is basing all the targeting data on social network profiles. How accurate is your profile? In addition, this means that all your demo targeted campaigns will be run on the content network and only these social networking websites. Again, this may be a boon for those who find social networks a profitable advertising venue. For many I believe social networks = poor quality traffic that will produce a high volume of junk clicks. Not necessarily click fraud, simply unqualified, low conversion traffic. This is a Beta, so hopefully over time Google will be able to use demographic targeting features across search and content partners. The question is, if Google links this data with Google Health data will I be able to display pain relief ads to somebody who just broke their arm?

Jerry Nordstrom
Lead Discovery