I just had an interesting meeting with Yahoo! Search Marketing in which we were reviewing performance for last quarter for one of our clients. One of the interesting pieces of the analysis was a look at the index of demographic information against certain keywords. We have one very broad keyword that we’ve been working on to convert better and based on this analysis, this broad keyword was indexing much higher on the 17 and under market vs more exact keywords. This totally changed the potential approaches we might have towards getting this keyword to convert. Read more to follow the logic of why this is good…

Here’s how it works: since Yahoo! has a lot of information about people who have accounts through their site (email, calendar, music, etc.) including demographic information (age, sex, education, etc.) and the abililty to overlay additional information available from the various direct marketing databases

AND they have the second most popular search engine on the internet - they have the unique ability to combine the data and index specific demographic data against the keywords people use. Sneaky, but interesting.

This is especially interesting because MSN is offering the ability to target based on demographics and geography in their new Ad Center Pilot (paid search on MSN). MSN has data from hotmail, MSN stores, the game zone, MSN Messenger, etc. I’m really looking forward to testing the demographic and geographic targeting features of MSN.