Demographic tools are hot. Now that the market is getting more and more competitive and the CPC is rising steadily, building or optimizing your campaign with demographic data can give you just that edge you need. There are several free tools available that can help you here.

One of the top tools I like and use is MSN Audience Intellegence from MSN adCenter Labs. Lets say you’d like to promote a dog training ebook from Clickbank. First thing to do is keyword research, one of the best being the AdWords External Keyword Tool. For example you start with entering ‘dog training’ (after selecting your market and language). This gives you a big list of related keywords.

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Pick the ones you like (3-4 words tend to convert better) and enter these again. You can repeat this process to build a huge list of very related keywords.

Now to get an idea of the buying market, take 2-3 of the best fitting keywords and enter these in the MSN Demographics tool. As an example I used ’stop dog from barking’.  Now you get a nice breakdown of gender and age distribution for your keyword(s):

This data can be very helpful. When you use MSN Search to advertize you can directly target specific demographic areas and raise or lower your bid accordingly. At the moment this is not possible yet with Google AdWords. But what you can do in AdWords is use this data in the content network for selecting appropriate sites to advertize on. It is called the Placement Tool. To get there, click on ‘Add placements’ in your content campaign and then on ‘Select demographics’. You will see something like this:

In this screenshot I already selected several demographic options. You can even use an ad filter, for example for sites that have banner ad placements available. After setting your options, just click on the ‘Get Available Placements’ button to get a list of websites to target for your specific demographic needs.

Another cool tool, that can do the same and more is the Google Ad Planner. I will not explain all options here, for an introduction visit Ad Planner Support. They have some excellent videos with tutorias. Let me suffice to say that once you have compiled a list of sites that fit your need with the Adplanner Tool you can export them and use them for your content campaign.

Use these tools, experiment with them. And when you know or work with any other great demographics tool, please comment on this blog.