Finding your audience with demographics

Marketers have long looked to get a better understanding of the audience make-up of different print and broadcast media to help them better tailor their message and deliver more relevant ads to consumers. This audience insight is equally important in digital advertising, which is why, more than a year ago, we introduced a beta enabling you to show ads based on certain demographic categories, like age and gender.

Since 2011, we’ve been hard at work making this available to more advertisers.  Marketers have been getting great results. For example, Blue Nile used demographics in a campaign to reach potential engagement ring buyers and saw a click through rate of 10x higher than the U.S. national average for online display campaigns.

Today, we’re happy to share that this feature is now widely available within AdWords for campaigns targeting 39 countries; if available in your region, it will start to appear in the Display Network Tab as Age and Gender targeting.

Demographic categories complement other AdWords targeting features, such as interest categories, remarketing and keyword contextual targeting. The ultimate goal is to help you better refine your marketing message and reach the right audience with the right ad. For example, if you sell yoga gear and know that your core audience tends to be women between the ages of 25 and 34, you can set your campaign to show mostly to that audience, rather than showing your ads to people less likely to be interested in the product.

Our goal is to help you better connect with your audience, meaning more effective marketing campaigns for you. This is an important part of our efforts to make our ads better for users, which helps to fund content across the web. To get started using demographics in your campaigns, visit our help center.

Posted by Jon Krafcik, Product Manager

New: Tablet targeting options now available

In May, we let you know that tablet targeting options would be coming soon. We're excited to announce that tablet targeting is now available to all advertisers. Tablet targeting is a new AdWords campaign targeting option that gives you more precise control to effectively reach the growing number of tablet users.

You can find the new Tablets with full browsers targeting option under the Networks and devices section of the Settings tab within your AdWords account. While in the past you were able to specifically target Apple iPad devices under Mobile devices, the new tablet targeting option elevates the tablet to its own device category and enables you to target your ads to all tablet devices. In addition, the new tablet targeting option allows you to select specific tablet operating systems to target. For example, to display your ads on only the Apple iPad, you would choose Tablets with full browsers as your device targeting setting and iOS as your operating system setting.

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With this launch, your ads will automatically start running on tablet devices, and no further action will be necessary on your part. If your campaigns were specifically targeting Apple iPad devices, you may notice an increase in impressions and costs as we include more tablets in our ad serving options. If you don’t want your ads to appear on tablets, you can change your tablet targeting settings by following these step-by-step instructions.

With more than 165 million tablets expected to ship over the next two years, we believe that the strong growth of tablet usage will provide significant opportunity for marketers to connect with consumers in more powerful and relevant ways. We hope this new tablet targeting option helps you better capture this opportunity.

Posted by Surojit Chatterjee, Product Manager, Mobile Ads

Language targeting refresher and update

You may have noticed when creating a new AdWords campaign that we sometimes suggest targeting multiple languages based on the location that you’ve targeted. To help you understand why we make those recommendations, here’s a refresher in how language targeting works today.

Refresher

Campaigns that target a language are targeting the interface language that a user has set as the language in which they’d like the Google interface to be displayed. A Spanish-speaker living in the United States, for instance, may want to perform searches on www.google.com but change the interface language setting to Spanish. Alternatively, an English-speaker living in Japan may want to perform searches on www.google.co.jp but see an English interface.

Currently, your ad appears only when the user's interface language matches the targeted language. This means that your ad won't necessarily appear when a user searches for a keyword in the language that you're targeting, if the user’s interface is in another language.

For example, if you sell motorcycles in the United States using the keyword motorcycles, and you target only the English language, your ads won’t appear to bilingual users who search for motorcycles but do so within a Spanish interface. Especially when targeting a geographic area with bilingual residents, targeting multiple interface languages can help your ad appear in front of as many potential customers as possible.

New improvement

Determining the language of the search from the query itself can sometimes be difficult, since some words are common to more than one language. However, there are five languages in AdWords that can be uniquely identified by their characters: Greek, Hebrew, portions of Japanese, Korean, and Thai. Therefore, starting in late April, if you're targeting any of these five languages, your ad will be eligible to show for all queries in that language that match your keywords, regardless of the user's interface language (your location targeting settings will still apply).

For example, if you have the keyword λουλούδια (Greek for flowers) in a campaign that targets the Greek language, your ad will be eligible to appear whenever a user searches for λουλούδια, even if the user’s interface is in English.

While targeting multiple interface languages will continue to be the best way for many of you to maximize the amount of traffic that your campaigns receive, we’ll continue to look for new opportunities to improve our language targeting offering.

To learn more about targeting interface languages, please read this FAQ.

Posted by Lisa Shieh, Inside AdWords crew

New regions and cities now available for targeting on AdWords

Starting today and over the coming weeks, we’ll be rolling out city targeting in 17 additional countries to help you reach more customers in local markets with your AdWords campaigns. With this expansion, city targeting will now be available to AdWords advertisers in 34 countries. In addition, we’re also announcing the ability to target regions in Argentina.

The countries with new city and region targeting options in AdWords are (click to see the full list):

Argentina (region targeting only), Austria, Brazil, China (coming soon), Colombia, Czech Republic, Finland (coming soon), Hungary (coming soon), Malaysia, Mexico, Morocco, New Zealand, Nigeria, Norway, Poland, South Korea, Switzerland, Ukraine

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Location targeting helps you tailor your ads towards specific markets, analyze your AdWords campaigns by market, and optimize your campaigns for higher return-on-investment. Now, you can go a level deeper and optimize the performance of your AdWords campaign at the city level. For example, let’s say you run a clothing company and have stores in several cities in Mexico. You conduct a campaign-level analysis and learn that you're getting more conversions from big cities such as Mexico City than rural areas. Here are a few steps that you can take to optimize your AdWords campaign:

1. Run an AdWords geographic report or Analytics report to determine where your users are located and where you’re getting your most valuable traffic.
2. Adjust your campaign setup:
• Run a campaign targeting the best-performing cities such as Mexico City, and increase the bids on the keywords in that campaign to maximize your ad impressions in those cities.
• Consider setting up a regionally- (or nationally-) targeted campaign with potentially lower bids on the same keywords to capture additional traffic from outside your top-performing cities at a lower cost.
3. Adjust bids accordingly to optimize for the highest campaign ROI.

We hope that with the expansion of city targeting, advertisers in more countries will be able to reach their local customers more effectively. Visit our Help Center to learn more about getting started with this feature.

Posted by Gordon Zhu, Inside AdWords crew

International tourists find the Polish seaside through Google AdWords

Sebastian Hejnowski’s parents built the Villa Zdroj Bed and Breakfast in 2002 to share Poland’s beauty with weary travelers. Located in Miedzyzdroje, a city on the coast of Polish island Wolin, Villa Zdroj is one of the island’s first modern bed and breakfasts.

Sebastian’s parents handle reservations, property development and sometimes breakfast. Sebastian runs the advertising efforts for his parents’ Villa, including Google AdWords. “When we first started our AdWords campaigns, we focused on Poland but we soon realized that there was increasing interest from our neighboring countries,” says Sebastian. When he noticed an upward trend in drop-in visitors from other countries, he decided to launch campaigns across Poland’s borders as well.

Villa Zdroj

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According to Sebastian, the variety of outdoor activities combined with the relatively inexpensive cost of Polish tourism make Wolin a vacation paradise for Germans and Scandinavians. “Germans and Scandinavians were coming to Miedzyzdroje, but mostly staying in expensive five-star hotels,” says Sebastian. “B&B’s were never an option since they didn’t know where to find them.” So Sebastian made Denmark, Germany, Norway and Sweden his first international targets. The strategy proved correct: “We were one of the first Polish B&B’s to create a website in English. When we targeted an AdWords campaign to these people, they started calling and booking reservations.”

As time went on, Sebastian noticed that Poland had become more and more accessible to Europeans due to an increase in flights to the area. To capitalize on this trend, Sebastian expanded his AdWords campaigns even beyond bordering countries. “With time we extended the campaign to the Great Britain and the Netherlands.” says Sebastian. “Europeans tend to explore new places and travel extensively.”

Sebastian with his family
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Today, foreigners account for more than half of Villa Zdroj’s guests. And Sebastian estimates that up to 60% of those international guests book Villa Zdroj because they found his AdWords ads.

Thanks to his effective targeting, Sebastian now sells out all of the villa’s rooms during peak summer travel season. He adjusts his ad campaigns to reflect availability: “In summer, we track vacancies and adjust our campaigns accordingly. We pause the campaigns if we’re booked a few weeks out.”

In 2012, Poland will host the Euro Cup and Sebastian’s dad is already getting ready for an influx of visitors. “My father is considering buying a big projector so everyone can watch the games together in the communal room,” says Sebastian. “We’re already excited to share the Polish seaside with more out of town visitors!”

Learn more about Villa Zdroj Bed and Breakfast and Sebastian’s successes online in this short video (it's in Polish, but you can view captions).

Posted by Nathania Lozada, Inside AdWords crew