Just when you think MSN AdCenter’s pulled a fast one on Google with their demographic targeting capability, Google yanks the rug out from under them. Yesterday Big G introduced their own demographic feature in the AdWords site tool interface – Search Engine Roundtable has a screen shot.
Worse than that, Google seems to be outdoing MSN at their own game. AdCenter offers targeting for gender, age and location; Google sees that and raises it by household income, ethnicity and whether children are present. And Google’s annoucement comes on the heels of AdCenter’s open sign-up period Monday, which left some users cold. Was it coincidental timing, or did Google smell blood in the water?
Google’s new demographic AdWords components currently only work with site-targeted campaigns; using data provided by comScore networks, Google will suggest publisher sites from AdSense that fit the profile of your demographic needs (previously, Google could only suggest sites for AdWords customers based on topic and URL). It’s too early to tell how well this will work, but Andrew at Traffick thinks that the comScore data could work against the system. It “likely means very little meaningful data will be available for smaller sites,” he writes, and “Smaller sites make up the majority of sites currently being recommended by the site suggestion tool.”
Efficacy aside, the roll-out has folks marvelling at Google’s killer instinct. Loren Baker has a quote from Andy Beal or Fortune Interactive that sums it up best: “One of the strongest cards MSN had with adCenter was their demographic targeting. With Google adding demographics to AdWords, MSN is going to have a tougher time convincing advertisers that they have something unique to offer.”
