AdWords Testing Demographic Bidding

[mandy]

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 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...

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..

full announcement: http://adwords.blogspot.com/2008/01/demo...-test.html

[mandy]

Update:

Today we're announcing that demographic bidding is now available for all AdWords advertisers.

What is demographic bidding? It's a feature that helps you target your ads to users of a particular age group (such as ages 18-24), by gender, or to combinations of those groups. You can use demographic bidding whether you are using contextual or placement targeting and with both CPC and CPM bidding. You can refine your reach based on users' gender and age on certain sites in the Google content network such as MySpace and Friendster, whose users provide that information about themselves. AdWords receives the data in anonymous and aggregate form from participating partner sites, which means that users can’t be personally identified.

Here's an example of how demographic bidding works: suppose you sell women's basketball shoes and want your ad to be seen by 18-24 year-old females. You could raise your bids to increase the frequency with which those users see your ads. You can also restrict your ads from certain users if you think they're not meeting your ROI goals. In the case of women's basketball shoes, you might find that the male, 18-24 year-old demographic is receiving a significant number of impressions but not clicking-through or converting well, and decide to restrict that group...

full announcement: http://adwords.blogspot.com/2008/03/demo...lable.html