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Where Am I? The Challenge of Geo-Targeting
By Cameron Ferroni | September 17, 2007
As I’m in the process of selling my house, I’m reminded that real estate is all about location, location, location. And when it comes to local, obviously, location is a key part of everything we do. And yet, location is in fact one of the most difficult things to get right, from both a customer and an advertiser standpoint.
From the advertiser standpoint, what should my “geographic boundaries” truly be? If I’m a popular downtown restaurant, then hey, anyone searching for anything in Seattle is a valuable lead for me. But if I’m a five-table neighborhood coffee shop, then Seattle is probably too broad to really give me value. Good enough then, maybe I should just focus on advertising in my neighborhood - well, that sounds good in concept, but very few of the search engines have a direct concept of neighborhood, and even if they do, they very widely - for example, my house alone is sometimes considered to be in the Seattle neighborhood of Montlake, sometimes Capitol Hill, and sometimes the University District. ZIP codes are a good choice, since most people know their ZIP, but even then you run into issues of businesses that are on the border of two key ZIPs, or ZIPs that are too large to be as targeted as you want. And that is just the challenge for a business with one location, so what about businesses with multiple locations, or ones that serve an entire city (like a plumber), in which case the specific business location is less relevant? The key is making it easy for any type of advertiser to mix and match their geo-targeting.
But what about the customers: What should they do? They don’t always type in a place, or an address, or a neighborhood - they often just search. The customary answer is to target ads based on their IP - but where their IP is may or may not have anything to do with where they are searching. If I’m searching for a dry cleaner near my home, and I’m doing it from work (to clean my work uniform, of course) then IP targeting won’t do me much good. Similar to above, if I try to narrow my search by neighborhood, what if I live on the boundaries of 2 different neighborhoods - the closest dry cleaner to my house may very well be just a block away , but technically in a different neighborhood. What I really want to say is “find me a dry cleaner somewhere between work and home, along the following route that I drive every day?” How do I do that?
The point is, we have a long way to go to really be able to translate how real people think about location into how computers can understand, process, and represent it. I can’t wait to see the developments in this space…
Topics: Local Search |
September 18th, 2007 at 8:46 am
[…] Where Am I? The Challenge of Geo-Targeting from LocalPoint […]
September 19th, 2007 at 3:21 am
Yep, it’s going to be interesting, especially as a business may not realize where their ‘local’ customers really come from. i.e. just because a restaurant has a delivery area of 5 miles, doesn’t mean that a large chunk of their potential customer base isn’t in the 5-10 mile area, or even the next town over…
September 27th, 2007 at 4:59 pm
[…] Simon Heseltine: Yep, it’s going to be interesting,… […]