New Demographic Planning for Print Ads

To make it even easier to reach your desired audience, Google Print Ads has recently launched some new demographic targeting features. Using data from Scarborough Research, we have set up demographic profiles for roughly 30% of our publications. These profiles provide a breakdown of each publication's readership by household income, age, gender and educational background:

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You can use this data when searching for publications to add to your campaign. On the first step of the campaign setup wizard, you'll now see a heading for demographic criteria. These controls allow you to specify the exact audience you want to target, again in terms of income, age, gender and education:

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As you change these settings, your publication results will automatically update with scores reflecting how well each publication matches your ideal readership. We show you both how many people in the targeted audience you can expect to reach through publication, and how effective it is to reach them through that title compared to the average (the "efficiency index").

You can also sort the results by any column. For example, to see the most efficient publications for reaching your target audience, click on the "Demographic Idx" column heading to see the most effective titles at the top of the list. And, to make sure that you see the widest possible choice of publications, titles for which we don't have complete demographic data will still be available in your results.

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While you're choosing the newspapers that you want to include in your campaign, we'll keep track of the total circulation and targeted audience figures for those you have selected. You can play with the search settings and see how this affects the figures for your choice.

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We hope that these features will help you build the best Print Ads campaigns for your business. Try them out, and let us know what you think through the "Send Feedback" link at the bottom of every page. And stay tuned: we'll be adding more ways to use demographics in the coming months.

Posted by Tom Ayles, Software Engineer for Google Print Ads