SEM and Your Target Customer

Unlike social media sites like Facebook, search engines can’t collect demographic data from their users. So you don’t have the ability to target SEM ads to a specific demographic group as accurately as you can with other online lead-generation tactics like social advertising. For example, you can’t target your SEM ad to appear on search results for “unmarried females, ages 35–45, who own their own homes.”

In SEM, the search engine user defines the marketing experience, and controls which types of SEM ads will appear with their search results. When they enter a search keyword or keyword phrase (e.g., “inexpensive wireless routers”), the search engine will choose to display SEM ads based on those keywords. The search engine has no idea whether the person searching for “inexpensive wireless routers” is male or female, ages 25, or 35, or 65. It only knows that these keywords represent a particular interest that the user is searching for at that time.