Google are currently accepting sign-ups for the new demographic targetting feature of their Adwords facility. This will enable you to focus your campaigns more tightly on your selected audience and can provide more of an insight into your ads performance for those groups.

The new feature which is due to start testing within the next few weeks will provide both bidding and reporting for advertiser who are currently running contextually targeted or placement targeted campaigns. The information for this will be gathered from some of Google’s partner sites who gather user’s data, such as gender and age, from filling out subscription and registration forms. Obviously this raises privacy concerns but Google have been quick to allay such concerns by ensuring that the information received by them will be anonymous, only contain aggregated data on people over the age of 18 and will only be sourced from those who have given permission for the information to be shared.

You can target your potential customers in two ways, bids can be modified to target a more specific section of your audience, e.g 18-22 year old females can have their bid increased to 200%. Or you can choose your ads not to target a certain group of people. Of course some people may not know straight off the bat who they should or need to be targetting, for these people there will be a reporting facility to help you decide where best to target your ads.

Google intends to open this facility to advertisers within the U.K and the U.S and will be adding advertisers on a rolling basis from when the beta opens.

Original source - http://adwords.blogspot.com/2008/01/demographic-bidding-beta-test.html