by Laurie Sullivan, Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, February 23, 2017

Diversity moved back into the limelight when U.S. President Donald Trump took a seat in the White House as the forty-fifth president — not just the rhetoric and banter in digital social networks, but in the physical world, too — mainly as a result of the sweeping changes to immigration policies.

U.S. immigration policy reform could force a change in the demographic landscape, so the personal finance Web site WalletHub conducted an in-depth analysis of 2017’s Most & Least Culturally Diverse Cities.

To identify the most culturally diverse places in America, WalletHub’s analysts compared 501 of the largest U.S. cities across three key metrics, including ethno-racial diversity, linguistic diversity and birthplace diversity.

For example, New York ranks No. 6 overall and No. 1 among large cities in terms of cultural diversity, No. 5 in terms of ethno-racial, No. 4 in linguistic, and No. 255 for birthplace diversity. At No. 23, Long Beach, California has a cultural diversity score of 84.22, ethno-racial score of 12, linguistic score of 23, and birthplace score of 294.

So how does a search marketer target based on this changing diversity?

Typically, search ad targeting is limited to age, gender, remarketing, similar audiences to remarketing, as well as geography, which would be the closest marketers can get to targeting by diversity, along with age and gender, said Jonathan Kagan, senior director of search and biddable media at MARC USA Results: Digital.

The Google Display Network enables marketers to do all that, along with interests, categories, affinities and Web sites. “While you can’t target by race, you can target content, domains, interests to which a certain demographic has an affinity,” Kagan said.

Diversity is not cut and dried — it has multiple meanings, especially when it comes to paid-search advertising and marketing. Although little known, Google provides basic income filtering layered over a search ad paid click in one step. “‘Diversity'” can also mean “Income levels,” Marty Weintraub, founder of aimClear, a paid marketing and advertising agency, wrote in an email to SearchBlog.

In fact, marketers have been targeting search and display ads into geographic areas with various social economic realities forever. Some examples include bringing security systems into dangerous neighborhoods, native dancing festivals to areas of native concentration, which may or may not portend diversity by reality and/or cliché, he explains. “Don’t forget searches for immigration attorneys, information about deportation, would be easy to do with keyword research by zip code.”

There are queries literally linked to diversity, Weintraub said. Marketers also can link Google Trends by geography to link search with diversity.

MediaPost.com: Search Marketing Daily

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