Microsoft Targets Explicit Personalisation

I've been looking at personalisation strategies for a number of years, with the end game aiming to improve online conversion rates and processes by treating customers differently based on who they are. Microsoft have started to look at personalisation by using the large amount of data they hold on keywords and website access. The Microsoft Ad Center Lab Demo shows how they would treat customers searching for specific keywords or accessing specific websites, based on the customer age and gender. This can be seen here.

There are obvious limitations to the use of this tool in its current state however. Unfortunately, it is not always practical to assume a specific gender and age group for a specific keyword (except in the case of the "over 60's female car insurance" search term, for obvious reasons!). Take, for example, the people who use this blog (not that I realised anyone other than me read this!):



On this evidence, my marketing messages would assume that my users are Males under the age of 18. However, only 57% of my users are male, and Microsoft predicts that 27.45% of my users are under 18. Thus this segment actually only accounts for 15.5% of all of my visitors, leaving me with the problem of alienating 85% of my visitors........

Closing point: This is an interesting tool, and I for one now know more about my site than I did. Thus as an analytics tool it works, but I'm now sure you can start taregetting your adwords bidding by demographic on this basis.......