Knowledge is the Foundation To Success  

On March 12th, Yahoo Search Marketing rolled out new targeting options to provide more control to you as a pay-per-click (PPC) advertiser. Here’s a quick recap of the new targeting capabilities:

1. Enhanced Geo-targeting: you now have the ability to pick more than one geo-targeting option. You can pick different geo-targets by AdGroup or campaign, as well as mix-and-match options. You can also chose to do premium bidding for one target area. For example, you advertise to the entire state of California, but you know you do really well in the LA area. You can choose to bid higher (by percentage or dollar amount) in the LA area.
2. Day-Parting (Ad Scheduling): something we’ve been requesting here at JumpFly for awhile is the ability for Yahoo to automatically turn on and off your campaigns based on time of day. This works particularly well for those who receive many phone calls and want to make sure that they have someone available to answer those calls, or to make sure you don’t run out of budget when your target audience is online and searching. Yahoo took it a step further and allows you to schedule your ads based on your account’s time zone OR the searcher’s time zone (which works well for scenario two above). Another nice feature is that you can schedule this on the campaign or AdGroup level. Unfortunately, they chose to do it by the hour level only, so no half or quarter hours, but it’s a start!
3. Demographic Targeting: you can now target your desired audience, whether by age or gender, and premium bid to them. Something to know is that it does not allow you to exclude any demographic audience, except for those 17 and under. But if you know your best target is a female you can premium bid to females, or if you know that the age target is 25 to 29, you can premium bid to them. Keep in mind if your best target is a female age 25 to 29, it will combine the premium bids; if you set your premium bid at $.50 for a female, and $.50 for ages 25 to 29, it will actually bid $1.00 more for a female age 25 to 29.
4. Better Reporting: Yahoo also is rolling out better reporting options so you can run reports on demographics, dayparting and geo-targeting.

It will be great to see how these improvements pan out over the next few weeks, but I’m encouraged by the changes Yahoo has made and hope they continue to improve.

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Here at JumpFly, we’ve been doing a lot with regional clients in tightening up the areas they want to target for their Google AdWords accounts. Google has some pretty sophisticated geographic targeting (Geo Targeting) levels – well ahead of Yahoo Sponsored Search and MSN. (Quick note: we did get an email from our Yahoo rep that there are new targeting options coming out in March, but I don’t know what they are yet). Here’s a quick peek at the Google AdWords geo targeting levels.

1. Country Geo Targeting: target a specific country or countries. Please note the default for US accounts was changed recently to US AND Canada. If you only want to target the US, you’ll need to remove Canada.
2. State or Territory Geo Targeting: select a specific state, like California, or states.
3. Metro Area Geo Targeting: target a metropolitan area like Los Angeles or Chicago. Metro areas are “geographical areas defined by Arbitron that generally correspond to the United States Federal Government’s Metropolitan Areas.”
4. City Geo Targeting: just want to target a specific city like Portland or Houston? Google doesn’t list all cities for a geographic area but it lists a decent amount.
5. Radius Geo Targeting: pick a point on a map and specify a radius around that point. You can do any mileage you like, but Google recommends a minimum of 20 miles or 35 kilometers.
6. Custom Area Geo Targeting: if have an odd shaped target area, like along a major highway corridor, you can select specific points on a map to create your own custom shape.

You can also exclude specific areas from your geo targeting at AdWords. Maybe you have multiple locations in the Dallas-Ft. Worth area but not in Dallas itself, and you’ve found that people who live in Dallas won’t travel to your location. You can exclude the city of Dallas, but still target the rest of the metro area.

That covers the different options on Google AdWords Geo Targeting. In another blog I’ll cover the factors that Google uses to determine when and to whom to show your ad.

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