Normally, when I login to Yahoo! Search Marketing, I leave the dashboard (no totals!) and go to the campaign summary right away. It was a pleasant surprise when I logged in today and saw the announcement, “New, More Specific Levels of Geo-Targeting Available.”
In the past, the only choices for geo-targeting in Yahoo! Search were to either choose the entire market or to block continents you didn’t want your ads to appear in. This wasn’t very efficient or usable, and even Yahoo! warned users, “Note: The accuracy of the blocked continents feature is not guaranteed and may vary depending on a number of factors.” After seeing the announcement about more specific targeting options, I tried setting an existing campaign to run ads in the United Kingdom, and guess what? I still couldn’t. Confused, (and my excitement waning) I tried setting up a brand new campaign, but the only geographical options were for the United States and Canada. It finally dawned on me that new improvements were only for North America. The functionality now works similarly to Google geo-targeting insofar that it lets you target by country (USA and Canada only), city, or zip code all at the campaign level. There’s even a nifty little map that highlights the places you target, also like Google. If you want to learn more about this new functionality, you can read about it on the Yahoo! Search Marketing Blog. It’s unfortunate, however, that there isn’t better targeting for outside North America. Be that as it may, there is the option to setup entirely separate international accounts through international versions of the Yahoo! Search Marketing interface, but again, not that efficient if all you want to do is have your same English language ads show up in different places.
Yahoo! has been trying to catch up with Google for a while. Google, after all, has had geo-targeting options for what seems like forever now and seems to be at least a few steps ahead of Yahoo! at all times. For example, to increase quality (and cost), Yahoo! introduced the “minimum bid,” something Google already had for a while. Recently, Google did away with the “minimum bid” and changed it to “first page bid.” Now, the implications of this change is totally another story, but you get the point. Who knows, maybe next week Google will come out with a way to target people by GPS on their mobile devices and show an ad for something in close proximity to an individual?
