Loading ...« Weekly Wrap Up - 28 March 2008 | Home | 2008 Perspectives on the Local Internet - Excerpt 3 »
Geo-Targeting Primer - Part 2 - Advertisers
By Cameron Ferroni | March 31, 2008
When it comes to Geo-Targeting, advertisers can face any number of choices, depending on the systems they are using. Let’s start from the highest level. At the end of the day, an advertiser cares about one thing - driving qualified leads. When done well, Geo-Targetting can greatly increase the number of qualified leads that an advertiser receives. At the same time, when done poorly, it can actually hurt an advertiser. So it’s important to understand the why’s and the how’s - to make sure that the right what’s are accomplished.
First the why. For any given service or product offering, an advertiser has to choose wisely in terms of where they want to advertise their product. A doctor in Philadelphia for example isn’t going to do a lot of business advertising to customers in Seattle. A camera shop in New York that specializes in mail order business however, can advertise nationwide. An insurance company that covers just the Northeast may want to advertise in any state in the Northeast. As you can see, the number of permutations and combinations of this can quickly get overwhelming. It’s quite common that advertisers will want to run different campaigns in each area, have different price points in each area etc. There isn’t just a one-size fits all approach to this challenge.
Which takes us to the How? The How for advertisers varies wildly between the various search engines, suffice it to say that some combination of the following are available on most of the major engines today. Note that in this list I’m going to assume that a consumer is either coming from that region (IP/self selected) or the site is specific to that region.
- Country - the least granular - I want my ads to appear for users that come from certain countries.
- State/Province - similar to Country, but at the state level
- City - you get the idea
- Lat/Long/Radius - specify a certain radius (5 Miles, 10 Miles etc) around a given point
- Neighborhood - specific neighborhoods within a City
- DMA - Designated Market Area - a term coined (and trademarked) by Nielsen to designate a group of counties in the United States covered by groups of television stations
- ADI - Area of Dominant Influence - similar to DMA, but driven via Radio coverage and Arbitron
- Street Level - folks aren’t doing this quite yet, but it’s only a matter of time.
You can see from this that it can get pretty confusing for an Advertiser pretty quickly. And unfortunately it’s hard for systems to make this truly easy, since much of the benefit of this system is the inherent flexibility. The camera shop can just target by country, while the dry cleaner may just want to hit the neighborhood.
But even within this it is hard. Neighborhoods sometimes overlap, or people don’t agree on the names. Most businesses don’t really know their lat/long. And frankly, just doing a radius search isn’t all that useful either - in Seattle for example you are much better going 10 miles north/south rather than 6 miles east west, unless you like advertising in the water! The other challenge with limiting advertising to certain regions is that you may be limiting the amount of traffic you get. Obviously someone advertising a doctor to all of Seattle will get more traffic than someone advertising a doctor on Capitol Hill. On the flip side, if you can find the balance, then you will get more “qualified” leads - and that, at the end of the day, is the measure of success.
Next week we’ll look at how the systems themselves try to bridge the gap between what Advertisers want, and what Users see!
On my local front this past week, I took the greyhound bus to Whistler BC, so kind of local, but more of a local way to travel!
Topics: Neighborhood, Maps, Local Advertisers, Local Search, Advertising, PPClick, Content |