Wednesday, April 11, 2007

What’s new? Demographic targeting. By Even Aas-Eng

MSN has for a while offered the option of buying demographic targeted ads. The segmentation is based on passport logins and windows live id. With the introduction of adcenter, Microsoft’s ad words competitor, demographic targeting has reached the search arena as well. And apparently with good results. According to searchenginewatch several clients has experienced a drastic decrease in cost per action using the new tool. And its good news for Microsoft, this is probably the first innovation within search that they launch before Google or yahoo.

So while Microsoft launches demographic search, Google goes the other way and launches demographic banner advertisement in their site targeting network. A interesting move that should suite the agency world well. The data used to perform the segmentation comes from comscore who has gathered demographic information about sites taking part in Google’s site targeting program. So offline segmentation goes online, why did it take so long?

You can read more about demo-targeting in adcenter here:
http://advertising.microsoft.com/demographic-targeting-report

And Google demo-targeting here:
https://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=33743

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

interesting article. I would love to follow you on twitter.