Demographic Targeting with Google AdWords

On the heels of MSN AdCenter's demographic profiling aspirations, Google AdWords now offers demographic site selection with gender, age, and household income as the demographic categories available.

Ed's note: Because having control of where advertising appears is a crucial aspect of marketing, having the ability to demographically control where ads appear is absolutely key. Just ask the television marketing industry. Now Google has jumped on board. Do you see yourself using Google's new targeting system? Discuss at SyndicationPro.

The demographic information comes from ComScore. Additional info from:

JenStar: "It will be interesting to see if advertisers find that the profiles are matching the resulting traffic from those sites. And I am sure some publishers will reverse engineer an AdWords campaign to see what demographic profile their own site is, and if it matches what they believe their traffic to be."

Traffick: "Essentially what this means is an improved functionality for the site selection tool, only applicable to content targeting of the "site targeting" variety. It's not a major foray into targeting search ads by demographics, then (yet)."

Does this take some wind out of MSN AdCenter's sails? Well, that's the power of Google. Once the demographic site selection gets significant usage along with MSN AdCenter, there will be some interesting feedback I'm sure. Seems like a good session idea for SES San Jose. h/t Andy