Google AdWords Officially Launches Demographic Bidding? Maybe Not

On Friday, Google announced they launched demographic bidding to every advertiser in the AdWords program. In short, demographic bidding allows advertisers to show their ads to specific age groups and genders. They did a beta launch of this earlier this year, where they dropped using comScore data for their own.

The problem is, I, as an AdWords advertiser, cannot trigger the “modify bids” for the “demographics” section under the “advanced options” of the “edit campaign” screen. Yes, I tried multiple campaigns and followed the step by step instructions exactly. I am, however, still able to use the comScore demographic targeting feature, which is different from the demographic bidding feature.

I also scanned dozens of forums for mentions of the newly activated demographic bidding feature and virtually no one is talking about it. That implies to me that I am not the only one unable to use the feature. I will shoot Google an email and let you all know when it is really live or if I am mistaken.

Postscript: Google emailed me about 7pm (EST) tonight saying that this feature is now officially rolled out to all advertisers. I assume there was some miscommunication earlier. In any event, I have confirmed this to be true and I have posted very detailed, step-by-step screen captures of how to set up demographic biddings for your campaign at the Search Engine Roundtable.