Over the past few weeks, even during this economic crunch, many of my clients have chosen not to cut back on their online advertising spending.  The result of not reducing their ad spend has been nothing short of amazing.

In a previous blog I discussed the importance of not reducing advertising spends, especially during a recession.  As a concerned Campaign Manager, I advise my clients to take advantage of this situation.  With companies making budget cuts, more often than not advertising and marketing budgets are the first to get trimmed or even slashed.  That being said, this leaves much room to scoop up customers, as there is less competition. 

This result of limited competition has not caused my clients to reduce the budgets, but instead increase their advertising spends by 50 to 100%.  Cory Treffiletti of MediaPost says that during economic uncertainty “the first response is to spend, spend, spend. When brands spend during a recession, they do so to take advantage of the lack of spending by their competitors, attempting to increase market share by hammering home product benefits and values. This is an aggressive strategy that can result in a stronger recovery once the rest of the economy catches up.”

Not only are the visitors continuing to buy products, but they are spending significantly more time on the site and viewing more pages per visit than before.

So before you start putting your advertising budget on the chopping block, think of the big picture; this may be your organization’s opportunity to outperform your competition and stay on top.

If concentrated visibility in front of a segmented demographic is one of your PPC goals, Demographic Exclusion is the vehicle that can help get you there.  Age and gender segment exclusions are just one of the tactics that the top search engines are providing advertisers with to help refine their PPC campaigns.  Options for targeting vary by engine.  Check out Katherine Bennett’s recent post for more on the details.

Google has been rolling out similar features at a higher rate since their acquisition of DoubleClick was solidified.  With more demographic data available form a higher volume of publishers, Google is able to offer smaller advertisers (budget-wise) the opportunity to target their core demographic with a minimal cost of entry.  While higher budgets will get you more visibility, it is possible to be effective with modest budgets as well.

Demographic exclusions can be implemented quickly and easily, from a technical perspective.  However, it is important to know your audience and even to have solid evidence to support your exclusion choices prior to implementation.  Have you profiled your customer base?  Reviewed demographics for the websites you are advertising on? Be sure to do your due diligence before testing.

To adjust your demographic settings in AdWords, select the campaign (available for content only at this time) and click “Edit Campaign Settings”.  On the Edit Campaign Settings Page, Demographics are located within the Networks and Bidding section.  In the example below, we have excluded all known users up through age 34.

After two weeks, we saw Click through Rate increase by 175%. See below for a comparison as shown in AdWords Account Snapshot report.

Although ads within this campaign received fewer impressions, we have eliminated known unqualified users from clicking our ads.  From here, we can refine our Click through Rates even further by segmenting into gender-based ad copy.  One option is to set up a duplicate campaign, each targeting either Male or Female users.  Ad copy should reflect the audience being targeted.  For example, an ad targeted toward Males for Mother’s Day gifts could be:

Browse Thoughtful Gifts
Get Your Wife What She Really
Wants For Mother’s Day This Year!
www.ClientSite.com/MothersDay

A Similar approach should be taken with display ads.  Use male-themed images to attract your male audience and female-themed images to attract your female audience. 

If you have not checked it out already, I highly recommend taking Demographic Exclusions for a test drive.

One of the first things that should be thought of when building an online campaign is your audience; specifically demographics. The online behavior and attitudes of men and women vary significantly. When you consider your audience some of the factors you want to determine are age, race, ethnicity, and language.  You can use this information to your advantage in online advertising. For the most part, you can advertise directly to your target market audience.

In light of behavioral targeting, Google Adword’s content network allows advertisers to bid on their audience by age or gender. Recently, Yahoo Search Marketing upgraded their system to allow demographic targeting. Their demographic targeting module enables advertisers to bid higher when someone from their selected audience is searching for a keyword they are bidding on. Yahoo allows more flexibility in reaching your targeted audience by allowing advertisers a percentage increase in cost-per-click for the audience they specified in the Yahoo interface.

Microsoft Sponsored Search is currently displaying ads on blog sites with postings related to demographic targeting. The ad reads, “Your audience, up close. Connect with women 25-54.” MSN is displaying ads geared to exactly what advertisers need to start considering, demographics.