Google Adwords Demographic Bidding

A new Google Adwords feature launched this week in beta allows advertisers to target users by demographics such as age and gender. Not to be confused with the March ‘06 appearance and then subsequent disappearance of the so-called “demographic site selection” feature that was tied to comScore Media Metrix data and included targeting by ethnicity, number of children, and household income. SEO Roundtable debunks this well.

Demographic bidding is currently available to a limited group of US and UK advertisers for both keyword-targeted (“content network”) and placement-targeted campaigns. The feature uses data collected by publishers to target advertising to specific groups, say, women ages 30 – 50 or men over the age of 50. With demographic bidding, advertisers will be able to run reports in Google to see which groups have the highest ROI and/or conversions and accordingly make decisions on bids and budgets based on those findings. There is also a feature that will allow you to exclude showing ads to groups that do not convert.

Not all sites will offer demographic bidding, since Google is avoiding the privacy issue stirred most recently by the Facebook Beacon brouhaha, by only using data from publishers who gather this information explicitly and with permission from users. For instance, most social networking sites have members provide gender and age information when they set up a profile. It is this data, scrubbed of personalizing details, which is used in AdWords demographic bidding and reporting features.

So, what’s demographic bidding good for besides making Google money?
We asked our pay per click management team to put their heads together and come up with ways this service could benefit our current clients. Here are a few case scenarios of how demographic bidding might be used for clients who specifically target moms/ parents.

1. Using demographic bidding with site-targeted campaigns. One of our clients is a national meal preparation franchise corporation. In addition to their keyword-targeted campaigns we are currently running a site-targeted campaign that allows us to place ads on specific websites we believe will generate conversions.
   Now, armed with demographic bidding, we’ll be able to test additional sites that may not be immediately content or topic related but are still good candidates for producing good conversions, allowing us to include sites which might have otherwise been overlooked. Also, by further refining targets on sites that we know convert, we free up money that can then be used to cast wider nets and find new interested demographics.
2. Using demographic bidding with the keyword-targeted content network. For our national online education client, we use keyword-targeted campaigns for the search and content networks. The keyword-targeted content network does not allow us to select the publisher sites we’re advertising on, but does allow us to see which sites provided impressions and clicks through a “placement report” that we perform after the campaign ads start getting impressions. Demographic bidding will significantly increase the ability to fine tune, at the outset where, our client’s ads appear in the content network. Additionally, after running placement reports we’ll be able to see which sites, and which demographic groups for each site, provide the most conversions.
3. Using demographic bidding to inform multi-channel marketing efforts. Working with the information gained through AdWords demographic bidding reports, we’ll be able to integrate other online media buying efforts. For example, if we find that for a particular client, site xyz.com gets the most conversions from those who are 50+ Boomers we can then use that information not only to refine our pay per click advertising copy to specifically speak to that 50+ age demographic group with messages they’ll be more likely to respond to, we can also buy display advertising on that site with a targeted message that reinforces the Adwords placement. The possibilities are endless if we combine data from demographic targeting into the other marketing and advertising efforts of our clients.

In general, we’re pretty excited about wielding this new targeting power for our clients and, as you can see, there are a lot of potential benefits to be gained. However, we wouldn’t be the industry professionals that we are without a little healthy skepticism! Our PPC team feels that Adwords demographic bidding is probably the tip of a behemoth Google behavioral targeting iceberg (most likely spurred by final ink on the DoubleClick deal.) Though the world is still a bit stung by Beacon and services like Google’s demographic bidding seem benign in comparison, gender and age are really the bare minimum of information gathered by the leading social media sites. So it seems apparent that Google is planting a seed to slowly get advertisers, publishers, and users, hip to behavioral targeting.

With geographic, age, and gender targeting under its belt, will advertising based on more personal or perhaps even private information like ethnicity, household income, job title, and number of children really be that far around Google’s next corner? We think not.

Adwords Insider Blog Annoucement
Google Demographics Bidding Signup and Description

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