I had not gotten around to read my iMediaConnection newsletter for a couple of days but Make the Leap to Demographic Targeting by Brian Kaminski brought up this point that jumped out at me:
"…Recently, my team tested the impact of demographic targeting with MSN using Microsoft's demographic profiling capabilities within adCenter. Fortunately, our client had a very good understanding of their ideal customer, both in terms of age and gender. This information proved advantageous because it allowed us to single out this group and treat them differently — without the need to go on a calculated fishing expedition in order to determine our desired audience.
When MSN was able to determine that someone in our target group was searching on one of our keywords, we were able to increase our bids to display that ad at the top of the results. We were also able to try different types of ad creative that would only be displayed to users with our specified demographics.
Overall, the results were quite impressive. By placing ourselves directly in front of our desired audience with a special message, we were able to improve our results and watch both our conversion rate and raw number of conversions increase during the test. In the end, the client was extremely pleased with the results and the lesson they gained. "
I was trying to get my former house plans client to do just that….but they had their head, or something else, stuck in the ground and preferred to unload several thousand dollars a month on AdWords and Yahoo PPC that usually had them losing 75 cents on every dollar spent, according to KeywordMax. Even when I showed them the data - they would not accept it. Look, if some narrow-minded architects want to make Google and Yahoo rich, who's the say they can't?..but I'm glad I'm not working with them.
But clearly, if there ever was a product that needs demographic profiling - its' house plans.
But as Brian Kaminski pointed out - there's also much more work needed to firm up the quality of online profiles.
"…To test my theory, I performed a survey — admittedly unscientific — of the people I work with. As I suspected, many of them maintain alternate aliases for various online activities, confirming my theory that improving the accuracy of online profiles will go a long way in boosting the effectiveness of demographic targeting"
But that brings up another interesting point and a potential problem - because if you can get the audience demographics to be much more accurate - you might run into not having enough of the right audience to show an ad. Hmm…interesting problem - which means that portals like Microsoft Live - will need to gain more marketshare in order to be fully effective - and right now, the big G, stands in the way of that.
Besides, Google might end up outdoing Microsoft for Demographic profiling.. you never know. Maybe Google Labs has a secret project going on right now ..and no one knows it yet. I'm just speculating.
My point - if you increase profile quality by getting rid of a lot of noise and false positives in a demographic group as Microsoft is defining in via the Experian Mosaic system, you're going to run into, in many cases, a shortage of qualified eyeballs…that's all I'm saying … and Microsoft needs to come up with a plan to address it now - because profiling will continue to improve - as will the ability of advertisers to target their audiences - it will become more specific as time goes on.
