First, MSN adCenter introduced demographic targeting, and a week later Google added it to the AdWords contextual advertising platform.

Google’s innovation is designed for use in the AdSense contextual ad network, not for search ads as with MSN.

Launching a “demographic” campaign is simple. First create a site-targeted campaign, then choose the “Select Demographics” option. Gender, age, and annual income are the main demographic characteristics. The “Advanced” function lets you target by presence of children and ethnicity. But this Google option is only available to US residents since it’s based on comScore MediaMetrix data. Google’s demographic targeting differs from MSN’s targeting, which is based on cookies obtained from user computers.

Once the demographic sector is chosen, Google selects sites from its partner network that match those criteria. How accurate and good is this targeting? Studies and system testing show that some sites in the selection match the target audience quite well, but others were unrelated to the query. Fortunately, you can pick suitable sites from the list yourself.

For many advertisers, the URL list and “Describe Topics” option would be more convenient until the demographic data sources are improved. In the URL list, you can enter a specific known site and find out whether it’s in Google’s partner network. In “Describe Topics” you can enter keywords, and the matching results will be relevant sites from the partner network.

Of course, demographic targeting in the contextual ad network is very important to Google’s development — this tool will be useful for many advertisers and marketers. But when will these capabilities also be available for search advertising campaigns?