Google AdWords has begun to test the ability to target ads on demographic data on publisher sites offering this sort of data to Google (and those who have gotten consent from their users).

AdWords does allow advertisers, in placement-targeted ads, to narrow down the field of potential sites to advertise on using broad demographic data like age, household income, ethnicity, and sex, but that’s just to find sites that tilt towards a certain group that an advertiser is trying to reach. This new feature will allow ads to target at the user-level - only those users meeting an advertiser’s demographic criteria will be shown the ads.

Of course, this feature will have enormous implications for social networks, which can often run lean on contextual clues with which to target ads, but are rich in demographic information on users, and which there is growing traffic momentum continuing towards.

Facebook’s SocialAds already offer similar targeting for advertisers, including the ability to target at the school level and stated interests, but SocialAds currently does not extend beyond the confines of Facebook’s site, and Facebook is not the only social networking site. The biggest player is still MySpace (which uses AdSense) and there are hundreds (thousands?) of Facebook applications that run AdSense.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 24th, 2008 at 8:46 pm and is filed under Online Advertising. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.