Adwords Introducing Demographic Bidding Beta

Google Adwords is to allow limited number of advertisers the opportunities to beta-test Demographic Bidding.

Demographic bidding is a way to help your ad reach audiences of a certain age or gender. Some publishers on the Google content network know certain individual details about their users. Social networking sites, for instance, often ask users to identify themselves by age and gender. On sites that provide this type of information about their users, Google can often display your AdWords ads to members of the groups that you prefer, or prevent your ads from displaying to members of groups you don’t want to reach. You can bid more for your preferred demographic groups to help make sure your ad reaches members of those groups.

Microsoft Adcenter has been providing demographics targeting features since it was first launched. The demographic information (gender and age) was based mainly on their large Hotmail user base. Google, however, started providing Gmail services much later and has a considerably smaller user base, it makes sense to depend on the demographic information of its Content Network sites. If Adwords Demographic bidding is able to provide fairly good ROI and volume to advertisers, Adcenter will not have any more advantage against Adwords. If volume is a rare, it may have a similar problem to the Pay-per-action model in which Google launched in 2007.

Adcenter setting on demographics

However, it is uncertain whether campaigns on Demographic Bidding can be shown on Google.com and Google’s search partner sites.

In the Inside Adwords blog post it mentions that Demographic Bidding is available to the Content Network (content targeted and placement targeted campaigns).

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.

However in the help center of Adwords, it mentions Demographic Bidding is available to both keyword targeted and placement targeted campaigns.