Well, finally your wish has been granted as Google is introducing a new demographic bidding feature in AdWords that will allow you to display your ads to specific gender and age group audiences on some sites in the Google content network. This give you more control over who your audience is for your online ads and provides greater insight into how your ads perform with certain demographic groups. This will help all advertisers who use Google Adwords better target their marketing dollars, or if the advertiser does not know or understand their current marketing audience, they now have the ability to learn who their target demographic group is.



Google will start testing this feature (which is in beta) over the next few weeks with a selected group of advertisers in the United States and United Kingdom. For those who join and are approved into the beta program, demographic bidding and reports will become available to advertisers who run contextually targeted or placement-targeted campaigns (with cost per click (CPC) or cost per impression (CPM) bidding) on certain sites in the Google content network.

So how does Google get this demographic information to be able to offer this ability to it's advertisers? Some publishers in Google's network, such as social networking sites, know the gender and age of their users because their users sign in with that information when they create a profile or fill out registration or subscription forms. Participating publishers anonymize this user reported demographic data and then send it to Google in aggregate form, allowing Google to adjust which ads are shown to members of specific demographic groups.

Here are two ways you can take advantage of this new demographic bidding capability. First, you can modify your bids for a particular audience segment, such as increasing your bid for 35 to 50 year-old females by 300 percent. Second, you can ask that your ads not be shown to certain demographic groups if they aren't meeting your return on investment (ROI) goals.

If you're not sure which demographic converts best for you, you can run Demographic Reports (found in the Report Center) to guide your bids for certain groups. These reports can show you campaign performance metrics (including impressions, clicks, click thru rate (CTR), and conversion data) by the gender and age range of users who saw your ad. If there are demographic groups that convert well, you can increase your bids for those groups, increasing the frequency your ad will be shown to this audience. You can also choose to have your ad hidden from groups that does not respond well to your campaign.

If you are an AdWords advertiser located in the United States or the United Kingdom, you can learn more about this new demographic bidding option and how to get started by visiting https://services.google.com/demographicbidding/.