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Janet Driscoll Miller is president, CEO and lead search strategist for Search Mojo. With over 10 years experience in search engine marketing, Janet is a leader in the industry. Janet is in the trenches every day, helping companies like Aetna, National Geographic and Pfizer increase their Google rankings and maximize their ppc campaigns.

Janet is a certified Google AdWords Professional and a Yahoo! Ambassador.

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Google’s New Demographic Bidding Still Has Kinks

Written on
January 25th 2008
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by Janet Driscoll Miller  |
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geotarget1.jpgOn January 23, Google’s Inside AdWords Blog announced a beta test where advertisers will now be able to demographically target their ads to an audience of a certain age group or gender. Demographic targeting, however, only works for the content network and placement targeting – not for the Google search engine or for the search network. This means that your demographically targeted ads do not appear on Google, but rather third-party websites, like MySpace.

There are only 24 websites offered as part of the beta program, ranging from well-known social networking sites like MySpace, Friendster possibly lesser known sites like CupidBay. Many, if not all, of these sites require online registration, which likely means that each website already maintains a database of demographic data about each user. Google then uses that demographic data to serve ads based on certain demographic criteria set by the advertiser.

While the Google demographic beta test is a welcome innovation for Google AdWords, there’s still much work to be done for demographic data to be integrated into the Google ad platform. Recently, there’s been a lot of discussion about search engines and their interest in Facebook and its advertising platform, which allows advertisers to target by age, interest and geographic location. On October 24, Microsoft invested $240M in Facebook – most likely to gain access to its advertising potential. Facebook, however, isn’t the only social networking site that allows demographically-targeted advertising based on gender, age, likes, and more. Other social networking sites, such as LinkedIn, allow advertisers to target their ads to an audience with a particular job title or job focus.

What is the benefit that these social networking sites have for the online advertising medium of PPC? PPC is immensely popular because advertisers only pay when its audience takes an action. Couple that with the power to ensure that your message reaches a very targeted audience and you’ve created a powerful advertising platform.

The potential is there for Google to eventually offer demographic targeting for ads served on its own search engine, instead of just through third-party sites. Google already is experimenting on its engine with “personalized search” – a way to serve more personalized organic search query results based on a user’s past search history. Personalized search hasn’t exactly taken off yet – but that may be due in part to the fact that personalized search does not include demographic data or preferences, which might give it more power.

Many AdWords advertisers have very specific demographic requirements for their advertising, and, for now, the only way to effectively target a certain demographic for ads served with Google searches is to pick very specific keywords or to set geographic targeting. This can really hamper an advertiser’s ability to reach its core audience – a problem that could be solved with demographic advertising for Google searches.

For example, recruiting firms might select the keyword “recruiting firm” as an AdWords keyword. However, both potential employers and candidates search for recruiting firms using this keyword. Why is that a problem? Recruiting firms don’t want to pay for clicks made by candidates looking for jobs. Candidates are more prevalent than potential employers, and candidates do not pay recruiting firms (in many cases) to find a job. So many recruiting firms really only want to target potential employers, focusing their advertising only to the audience that will generate revenue. Now imagine that the job data from LinkedIn were combined with that search term, allowing the recruiting firm to advertise, perhaps, to only HR professionals who search for the term “recruiting firm.” That combination would yield a much higher possibility of conversion and return on investment for the advertising recruiting firm.

I applaud Google for taking the first steps to offer demographic advertising in AdWords, but demographic advertising on the search engines has much more potential.



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