14 DAY TRIAL // "Demographic bidding is a way to help your ads reach audiences of a certain age or gender. If you want your ads to be seen by women aged 18-24, or people over 55, demographic bidding can help," is how the service's page presents it.
Advertisers can use this tool to have better product placement from AdSense in order to maximize the impact of their ads. What good would an advertisement for, say, walking canes, do when the person viewing it is in his/her teens and not in need of one by far? None. But when you deliver those ads to people you know are the age at which one might come to use it, the situation is totally switched around (I chose this example because of theirs).
The demographic data will be given to Google by some of the social networks out there, who claim it to be not identifiable: "Some publishers on the Google content network know certain individual details about their users. Social networking sites, for instance, often ask users to identify themselves by age and gender. On sites that provide this type of information about their users, Google can display your AdWords ads to the groups that you prefer, or prevent your ads from displaying to groups you don't want to reach," the service's page reads. Among the social networks in the program you can find MySpace, Friendster, Flirtbox and HotOrNot.
There are three steps to using this feature; firstly, you'd have to sign up and create your first campaign. After the campaign has run for about a week, a poll is to be made about the impact it had on different demographic segments and, based on that data, the third step would be to increase the bids for groups that provide good value, or on the contrary, that hide the ads from the segments they have performed poorly with.