A Step in the Right Direction

Enhancements to targeting features help advertisers get more relevant traffic from Content Match

I’m on the email list of a national shoe retailer from which I’ve bought product, both online and in their brick-and-mortar stores. This company’s customer emails are lively and interesting, and they use some clever gimmicks to grab your attention, such as a “shoe horoscope.”

But there’s a problem, and it’s a big one: Although the good folks at this shoe seller know that I’m a guy—both from my sign-up info and my purchase history—they continually send me emails that are clearly targeted toward women. As a marketer, I’m fascinated by their messages. But as a customer, their poor targeting leaves me cold.

A miss is as good as a mile
Precise targeting is vital when you’re marketing your products, both to prospects and current customers. And when it comes to online marketing, the data available to advertisers and ad providers such as Yahoo! means that you can get it right.

Back in March, we launched several new targeting features that can help you reach more of the audience you want at the right time, right place…and at the right price. These enhancements can be used with both the Sponsored Search and Content Match distribution tactics, but one could argue that they’re of greater value to your content campaigns. After all, when someone searches for your product, your odds are pretty decent that they’ll be interested in a well-written, relevant ad.

Content Match ads don’t necessarily have that direct connection to searches, so our systems try to match page content or other relevant data to serve the most relevant ads. Recent enhancements have made this matching more accurate, and we continue to make improvements, like looking at recent user activity and search queries to find out what users may want to see.

You can do a lot yourself to refine customer targeting by taking advantage of our targeting features. If you want to 1) segment and tailor marketing messages to your most valuable audiences, 2) gain more control over your marketing dollars, 3) monitor and price your campaigns with more visibility through enhanced reporting and forecasting, and 4) get a better return on your advertising spend, take the time to learn about and experiment with these new features:

Demographic targeting: Select your desired audiences on Yahoo! sites by age and gender, and automatically adjust your bids when we find a match for your targeting preferences. Demographic targeting lets you take advantage of Yahoo!’s wide user base and deep understanding of our audience. It uses a bid adjustment model, so you can you specify a premium bid amount for desired audience segments, without losing other traffic volume.

Ad scheduling (dayparting): If the people you most want to reach are only online at certain times of the day, or your business is only open during certain hours, you can select the time of day and day of the week during which you’d like your campaigns to run. This lets you schedule ads to be shown according to users’ time zones or your account’s time zone. Ad scheduling can be applied at the campaign or ad group level.

ZIP code-level geo-targeting: This gives you more control over how geo-targeting is used in your campaigns. You can mix and match geo-targeting settings at different levels within the same campaign or ad group. Our dynamic mapping features help you select individual ZIP codes and ZIP codes surrounding them.

This short tutorial will explain in greater detail how each targeting feature works, and where to find it in your account interface. If you’ve got your sneakers on, walk on over and have a look.

— Jeff Hecox