AdWords Demographic Targeting

January 24th, 2008 by Peter Glaeser | RSS feed for comments on this post | TrackBack URI

Google AdWords has several targeting functionalities already, for example by the location of the user. Now a demographic targeting feature for Google Adwords has reached beta status.

The interesting thing is not the feature itself as many advertising networks have had this for a long time). But I’m asking myself how they acquire this information. Geo-location can more or less be determined by the user’s IP address. But how do they get the gender and age of a visitor?

The answer is very simple: Google gets it from their AdSense publishers. Large sites have agreed to pass their user information from their databases on to Google. They say it is going to happen in an aggregated form. But hey, if you use any of the Google services that require a login, they know who you are.

I wonder how much more Google will be able to do once the DoubleClick takeover has been finalized. Then they won’t even need the AdSense publishers to get all the user information anymore.

To me all this sounds like a move against Facebook. Facebook allows demographic targeting on their site, so far the Google content network doesn’t. Google is afraid of losing advertising dollars to Facebook and needs to come up with new features. See, competition is very healthy for the market.