If you’ve ever read “What to Expect When You’re Expecting”, you probably didn’t notice a chapter about Google tracking your parental status in AdWords. Well, this is exactly what Google is doing, as Parental Status is now a demographic subset that advertisers can explicitly target.
This feature went live within the past 12 hours or so, and Google has yet to make an official announcement. However, we’ve already seen it in action, as you can see in the following figure:
Our resident data scientist Mark Irvine was the first of us at WordStream to notice the new feature. At this point, parental status targeting hasn’t been rolled out across all advertiser accounts – in fact, even some of our largest Managed Services accounts don’t have access to this functionality yet, suggesting that we’re still in the very early stages of the feature’s rollout.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, this demographic subset has three settings – “Parent”, “Not a parent” and “Unknown”, as you can see below. This allows advertisers to either exclude or adjust bids for these demographics, just as you would for the Age and Gender demographics. For specialty businesses (say, baby clothing retailers and children’s toy manufacturers), this could be incredibly valuable.
Obviously, the targeting potential of this feature is enormous. Imagine being able to capture new leads and conversions for visitors who just brought Junior back from the hospital! Of course, this means that I’ll almost certainly start seeing targeted ads, since my wife and I just welcomed Jules into the world…
This isn’t just a great way for advertisers to reach increasingly granular audiences with their advertisements, it’s also a glimpse into the possibilities of what Google could offer advertisers in the future. They've already supported targeting by Age, Gender, Interests, and now Parental Status. Could we eventually see demographic subsets based on race? Sexual orientation? The more data advertisers have the better (for them), but is Google going too far? I’m sure many of us remember the brouhaha Target found itself in when it started marketing coupons and other promotional offers to expectant teen mothers.
Whether Google will face a backlash over this new feature remains to be seen. For the time being, though, I’ve no doubt that many advertisers will be clamoring to get their hands on this new display targeting parameter!
This post originated on the WordStream Blog. WordStream provides keyword tools for pay-per click (PPC) and search engine optimization (SEO) aiding in everything from keyword discovery to keyword grouping and organization.