expertSEM

Last Friday,Google announced a new feature for AdWords advertisers utilizing content networks and media placements—demographic bidding. This could potentially be a great asset for all advertisers, particularly those with a specific product or service offering. Demographic bidding, often referred to as demographic targeting, allows one to deliver ads to a particular age group, gender or combination of those statistics. The service is available only through some sites, such as MySpace, Friendster, BlackPlanet or other sites that ask users to log in and define personal information. Google’s demographic targeting is not yet available with PPC management campaigns.

It is somewhat surprising that Google is just now offering this service, seeing as though Yahoo! has offered it “for a while now” (according to Kristen Warcham, Yahoo!’s director of corporate communication in an email to DMNews) as has MSN adCenter. We have tinkered with MSN’s demographic targeting for one of our client’s PPC management campaigns. In fact, our early experiments with the service were so new and revealing that we won a DMA ECHO Award for the campaign (you can check out a case study of the innovative we developed campaign and learn more about our findings).

We, too, thought demographic targeting was an amazing opportunity, especially for this particular client, which had a keen understanding of their target audience. However, there are still a number of kinks (or maybe I should say inefficiencies) associated with the service. Namely, people have to be logged in to their MSN account before searching and those people had to be honest when entering personal information—and both requirements are iffy.

I am loath to jump on the band wagon with this and sign up every client, but Google’s setup is a bit more promising than the other engines. Because Google is only offering demographic targeting on sites that people must log in to use and limiting it to media buying and contextual marketing, the service just may work. We will, no doubt, test this service with our clients that will most benefit; however, I am sure Google will have their own kinks (inefficiencies?) to work out before demographic targeting becomes a standard.