You Can See Them From Here

Now you can geo-target users at country, city or ZIP code level

Where are your people? And more importantly, are they finding you? Knowing your ads show up for the right people in the right places is crucial, especially when your business only caters to a specific area. You may already be familiar with geo-targeting, but now there are new ways to customize your targeting, whether you’re reaching for the whole country or want to pinpoint a city or ZIP code.

Geo-targeting is a clever little feature that can analyze a user’s search query, their Internet Protocol (IP) address and other user information to determine where they are and what ads to serve to them. For example, if you select Portland as a geo-targeted region for the sale of your product, searchers with an IP address in Portland will be served your ad. If you’re a Portland business, you’re likely to get more relevant clicks that can lead to more sales. Our new updates give you the chance for even more relevant clicks.

Coast to coast
While geo-targeting is usually seen as limiting your area to fewer clicks, one new geo-targeting feature can actually bring you more traffic. If you were trying to reach United States customers before, your choices were either to select the entire market — both the U.S. and Canada — or individually select each of the 50 states. (Oh, and the District of Columbia. How could I forget you, D.C.?)

Not only is that a pain, but selecting individual states can leave traffic out. There is a good number of Internet users whose IP addresses suggest they are located within the U.S., but are not easy to pinpoint to individual states you’ve selected. Since geo-targeting is designed to show your ads to users our system recognizes as located within your geo-targeted areas, in the old system those users might not have seen your ad.

Getting local
Up until recently, the geo-targeting functionality was built around Designated Marketing Area (DMA), regions determined by Nielson Media Research, Inc. (yes, the Nielson group who conducts the TV ratings surveys). However, some advertisers need even more focus, especially in more populous regions. Yahoo! now lets you zoom in on targeted cities and, in a beta feature, ZIP codes as well.

You will find geo-targeting when you sign up for your account online, but you may go back in and change your scope at any time. To do this, select “Geo-Targeting” under your Campaigns tab in your account.:

- Click the “Campaigns” tab.
- Choose a campaign.
- Click the “Campaign Settings” drop-down located in the upper right-hand corner (above the graph).
- Select “Geo-Targeting.”

From there you can use the pulldown to select your target area by Entire Market, Country, State/Province, DMA , City or ZIP code. A map will provide a visual of the areas you are selecting.

To narrow your scope further, try our ZIP code feature, currently in beta. First, select ZIP/Postal Code from the pulldown. From here you may type in the ZIP codes of the areas you want to serve, and use the Search button to confirm where the ZIP codes you’ve selected are located. You can also use the dynamic map to zoom in and out and find more ZIP codes within your area if you don’t know them all offhand.

How tight is too tight?
Keep in mind the more you target, the fewer users your ads may reach. Generally, you’re trading relevancy for volume, narrowing your target to a specific audience rather than every potential eyeball in the overall market. For example, if you service a small area and only choose five ZIP codes, you are likely to receive a limited number of clicks from people in those targeted areas who are searching for your products. We recommend choosing a minimum of 10 ZIP codes to broaden your scope.

You can also opt not to use geo-targeting by de-selecting all geo-targeting settings within your account, and your ads will be eligible for display to the entire U.S./Canada market. This may work for those who will ship products anywhere or who want to utilize the ability to get their brand name in front of as many users as possible.

Our new geo-targeting system is designed to help you hit the bullseye with your ads every time!

—Kastle Waserman, Communications Manager

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[ Categories: How To's, Updates & Enhancements, Yahoo! News ]
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32 Comments Add your own

1. Paul Pedersen | October 20th, 2008 at 11:59 am

I love the new feature but am curious how you target at a zip level. As with any other targeting, the way you get to the data determine how well that targeting works.

I think it would go a long way toward putting our minds at ease if we understood how you get to the zip level and what percent of the time it is accurate.
2. JD | October 20th, 2008 at 3:12 pm

Why did yahoo have to mess up the profile pages? This new format SUCKS.
3. Ryan | October 20th, 2008 at 4:48 pm

How do we specify cities and zips in the API?
4. Music | October 20th, 2008 at 7:02 pm

This is definitely a great feature. I wish Yahoo had implemented it earlier. I would like to geo-target certain organization.

Can we geo-target organization and ISP in the future?
5. Nicky | October 20th, 2008 at 10:50 pm

This is a great new feature for YSM. Now we just need to be able to opt out of the partner network and my life will be much peachier.
6. Jeremy Porter | October 21st, 2008 at 2:19 pm

I personally prefer zip code over DMA for geo-targeting. Now if there were just a demographic overlay to filter even further - I know we’ll get there, this is a step in the right direction.
7. gerry | October 21st, 2008 at 6:09 pm

Yahoo update
8. Stevo | October 22nd, 2008 at 6:35 am

This is all great, but I think its missing a major, major piece of the puzzle.In fact In sure of it. Where the conversion data for the drill down geographical areas?

So, if you do have the need and desire to drill down geographically, you can run reports to see which areas are converting/taking desired action and which are not.
9. Chad | October 22nd, 2008 at 9:14 am

This was very useful info. I need all the help I can get to further my website success.
10. Mark | October 22nd, 2008 at 12:59 pm

What about the ability to target within X number of miles of a city or zip code, like google allows?
11. Stephanie | October 22nd, 2008 at 1:20 pm

Great. Now, can you please make it so that you can add negative keywords at the campaign level versus the account level?
12. men of steel | October 22nd, 2008 at 2:23 pm

i would like to get the most traffic for the least amount of money. Are my campains at there most effective potential? and how do i know how to improve them. i have three campaings going but only one of them has numbers listed for clicks, etc.
Please let me know
Very Truly Yours,
Mr. Colin Damon
13. Peter | October 22nd, 2008 at 4:36 pm

This is a great feature and looks promising, too bad it doesn’t work and fails to deliver any impressions. It’s been 6 days that my campaigns have been idling, and the complete lack of support is embarrassing.

Though support admits there is a problem
“This is currently a high priority issue that is affecting multiple accounts that are geo-targeted to Canadian provinces.”
customers would expect a public notices and cautions prior to relinquishing funds into a highly unstable feature.

You get an E for effort, but Google Adwords still comes on top.

Peter
14. spencer wilkerson | October 23rd, 2008 at 9:38 am

skip the sales talk & get to how to make the changes
15. michelle | October 23rd, 2008 at 2:11 pm

DMA had a lot of faults, so I am happy to try this out at my site Apeepa.com
16. Dave | October 23rd, 2008 at 2:40 pm

WhoYahoo it is about time….
17. Gale | October 23rd, 2008 at 4:09 pm

I think it is a great feature!
18. Mordechai | October 24th, 2008 at 1:02 pm

BS”D

I want to go more GLOBAL not local. How can I expand my markets? Right now I am limited to USA & Canada.
19. Nick Stamoulis | October 27th, 2008 at 8:45 am

Geo targeting is important to the survival of many businesses. More and more people are looking for niches and sometimes that is a regional niche.
20. Sanzrao | November 2nd, 2008 at 10:42 pm

I don’t think more than 1% of will use micro level geo-targetting. Country level targetting which was available earlier is better option.
21. Tim Rule | November 4th, 2008 at 3:15 pm

@Peter - Sounds familiar. If you are targeting in English you have to select US and Canada market as Geo-targeted market. Just selecting Canada is only for French. I wrote a blog last winter on this.

@Mordechai - To target different markets outside of US/Can you have to open a new account for each country from the YSM international site. Yahoo Int’l
22. Pan.K | November 5th, 2008 at 3:02 am

Anyone has any idea why can’t we use geo modified keywords (e.g.: Hotels in Chicago) when we use geo targeting?

Yahoo informed me that I will have to target the entire market (UK & Ireland, US & Canada, etc) if I want to use geo-modified terms.

I just can’t understand that. As the matter of fact I had a hotels account and was geo targeting just one country. This worked fine up until a couple of weeks ago when I started having problems with the campaigns Now most of them have stopped receiving any impressions through sponsored search.

Help please!
23. Gina | November 5th, 2008 at 3:31 am

Not being able to use geo-modified keywords when you are geo-targeting one country (or even one city) is RIDICULOUS!!!! Yahoo! is way off the mark with this.

What if I am selling china dolls on an Irish-based website to Irish users? It seems now I will have to use only Google…
24. The Unit | November 14th, 2008 at 5:47 pm

Great tips!
25. Free PPC | November 14th, 2008 at 8:52 pm

Yahoo Search Marketing is getting better, much better than A d w o r d s even the quality of clicks.
26. Sandra S. | November 17th, 2008 at 11:35 am

Good feature, but for most clients, I won’t be using Yahoo SM until I can opt out of the partner/content network! — Sandy
27. pab | November 18th, 2008 at 7:17 am

How much will this cost? How reliable is it vs hype? How do I compete against a rogue?
28. John | November 19th, 2008 at 6:03 am

I’d like to know more about the zip targeting, specifically it’s accuracy. I own a fitness center franchise location. It s widely known in our company that 90% of each location’s clientele live within 2 miles. This 2 mile radius goes into 3 different zip codes. So I should be able to just select those 3 then off to the races. But if IP addresses are being used to determine a user’s zip, I may be in trouble. My desktop ip address shows up 10 miles away from where it really is, since I guess that’s where my ISP is based?
Any thoughts?
29. Nay | November 30th, 2008 at 12:34 am

Great !!
30. Михаил | December 28th, 2008 at 12:07 pm

За статью спасибочки, все по делу, достаточно много кто это уже применяет
31. BabanQurban | January 29th, 2009 at 12:52 pm

Увлекательно. Значит нужно какие-нибудь поправки вносить.
32. Robert Ferguson | March 17th, 2009 at 4:54 am

Regarding the zip code targeting feature, is there a maximum number of zip codes you can input? AdWords restricts advertiser’s to a maximum of 300 zip codes.