Google has begun beta testing demographic bidding as a new feature allowing advertisers to target specific demographics on the Google content network, according to the official AdWords blog. The new feature of AdWords, which is being rolled out to selected groups of advertisers in the US and UK, will allow advertisers to target their ads to specific age and gender groups across selected websites in the Google content network.

The sites that are available for demographic bidding make use of the information, such as age and gender, provided by users when they register on the site. It can be expected that this demographic information will not be 100% accurate, as there is rarely a strong enough incentive for users to provide accurate personal details during registration, and there is often no way for a site to verify the information provided.

Interesting features of content bidding include:

• The ability to specify a spend for targeted demographics, or to exclude demographics that you do not want to display your ads to.
• Demographic bidding reports, including separate tables for age and gender.

Google has a long way to go with building the number and range of sites that have signed up for demographic bidding. Google includes in its list of sample sites that offer demographic bidding several low volume sites, including Parpefeito and Flirtbox, sites that register fewer than 10,000 impressions per day, placing them amongst the smallest sites on the Google content network. However, it is interesting that social networking sites like MySpace are on the list. Having more control over which visitors to sites like myspace.com view your ads will allow advertisers to target their content network ads more successfully, and hopefully increase the success / conversion rate of content network campaigns.

The ability to target a specific demographic through the Google search network, rather than the content network, would be far more interesting to advertisers. Currently Microsoft AdCenter provide the ability to increase bids for age and gender groups, but do not yet enable advertisers to exclusively target a specific demographic.

Microsoft AdCenter use the information provided by registered Hotmail users to target specific demographics. Presumably Google could use Gmail registered user information to provide search based demographic targeting, which would be a vastly more appealing feature for advertisers.

Header image: wili_hybrid on Flickr

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