This comes up a lot w/ clients, and I agree there is some confusion here. But yes, we run both types of “geo targeting” for our clients, and both have their place.

Here’s a quick simple tip we can offer:

– Watch out for the state abbreviations that are also common words. For “Indiana,” you end up w/ “in”… which makes for weird matches. “Dentist IN” looks like “Dentist in…” and can be matched to many queries, including “dentist in california” etc. There are other funny examples that come up, and are worth anticipating. “IN” is one of the most common problematic ones.

Cheers – good article!
[Guy
Droid INDUSTRIES

This comes up a lot w/ clients, and I agree there is some confusion here. But yes, we run both types of “geo targeting” for our clients, and both have their place.

Here’s a quick simple tip we can offer:

– Watch out for the state abbreviations that are also common words. For “Indiana,” you end up w/ “in”… which makes for weird matches. “Dentist IN” looks like “Dentist in…” and can be matched to many queries, including “dentist in california” etc. There are other funny examples that come up, and are worth anticipating. “IN” is one of the most common problematic ones.

Cheers – good article!
[Guy
DroidINDUSTRIES.com

Why would I want to advertise a hotel in Chicago to people living in Chicago!? What if I want to target my Chicago hotel to people living in New York? The two-campaign idea wouldn’t make sense.

Yahoo! really needs to fix this issue…

You are not targeting audiences in the geo region you specify. You are are targeting those who use the geo related term in their keyword string.

In other words, you can do the same thing with your keywords.

Marketers wanting to geo-target generally mean that we want to target prospects within certain areas. Yahoo is no help in doing this, so don’t get confused.

While it is true that our systems will attempt to match geo-targeted ads with search queries containing a geographical term (e.g., “san diego dentist”), creating keywords that use both types of Geo is our recommendation. Here’s why:

- If you only bid on the keyword “dentist” and geo-target to San Diego, you may lose some geographical precision, as your ad may appear to users interested or located in suburbs of San Diego, such as Del Mar or Imperial Beach.

- Using the explicit keyword “san diego dentist” could give you a relevance advantage over “dentist” geo-targeted to San Diego, since it would be a precise match to the user search query “san diego dentist.”

- Using the geo-modified keyword “san diego dentist” for a primary keyword like this can offer more precise control of your cost-per-click, the ads that are displayed for this keyword, and the management of your ROI.

Again, the bottom line is that for maximum traffic you should use both types of Geo, because our systems are drawing from both “pools” as they determine which ads to display.

- Jeff Hecox