Search Engine Marketing Thoughts - Blogation

For several month now I've been writing about how outrageously unreliable the data from online metrics companies like comScore and Nielsen//NetRatings is. Indeed, loyal readers will recall that I predicted that the comScore data suggesting a decline in clicks on Google (that resulted in a 4.5% decline in Google's stock price) held little weight. Earlier this month, when Google announced impressive earnings, Google CEO Eric Schmidt specifically called out a not-so-anonymous online metrcs company for under-estimating Google's click volume.

Well, it turns out that you don't need to rely on me or Google's stock price or Eric Schmidt to see how bad online metrics companies are - all you need do is to play around with Google's demographic targeting tools inside AdWords, which happen to be powered by none other than comScore! To show you how bad comScore's demographic targeting is, I ran a query to find all sites that had good demographics for "women, 65+ or older, with no children in the household."

Here's proof of my query, along with the small print highlighting comScore's involvement:



Not to be too stereotypical here, but my assumption prior to seeing the data would be that there would be sites about knitting, medical advice, retirement, grandchildren, RVing, book clubs, and gardening. The sites that show up on the list don't seem to reflect my stereotypes. Here's a snippet of the 50 or so sites that Google recommended (highlighting by me):