searchengineman

Geo-targeting & Micro-targeting for Search Engine Marketing campaigns are staple methods, for improving CTR and relevancy. It’s only common sense if you wish to drive local traffic by appending your core keywords with city terms.

Micro-targeting:

“Denver Dentist”, “Chicago Plumbing”, “New York Taxi”.

This method is further refined by limiting the scope of the area where the campaign is served:

Geo-targeting:

“Denver Dentist” -> Colorado Geo-Target

“Chicago Plumbing” -> Illinois Geo-Target

“New York Taxi” -> New York State Geo-Target

Now what would you say if I told you that

all three of the above examples, would all be served in Texas, yes I’m talking phrase & exact match, outside of the Geo-Targets!

This scenario makes me scratch my head as to why Google & Yahoo think this is acceptable. It’s like I decided to place my Ad in the New York Times, and my publishing company decides to also include the same Ad in the Chicago Tribune’s (New York Section), & the Washington’s Post’s (New York Section)

Anyway…

We bumped into this issue one year ago, on Yahoo Search, for a Canadian campaign. We were advertising a home inspection company, in the province of Alberta. We were trying to determine if the campaign was showing in Alberta and saw our paid Ads displaying in the Toronto, Ontario area. After verifying that all setting were correct, we escalated this issue to our Yahoo Rep.

What Yahoo says about breaking Geo Targets.

Simply put, the use of geo-modifiers in the keywords trumps the geo-targeting settings at the campaign level; this is something we have resolved through meetings with geo-targeting team in the US. You were seeing results in Toronto – for ‘Calgary home inspections’ – that was geo-targeted to Calgary only because you included the ‘Calgary’ modifier in your query.
Doing a search for just ‘home inspections’ excludes your client from Toronto results and a Calgarian doing the same search will only see your client:

The policy is further outlined here:

http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/ysm/sps/articles/create_campaign2.html

In case you missed the small postscript numeral “ONE” I’ve made it a little easier for everyone else to see.

It doesn’t matter.

If you use a geo modified kw, you still get get the results no matter where your location is.

What if I lived in Toronto, but was looking to move to Calgary and I wanted to line up a home inspector. If ask for results for Calgary Home inspectors, I should get them. However, if there is a KW in their list – home inspectors, I shouldn’t get a Calgary result.

Having said that, the amount of people that are doing geo modified searches for Calgary that don’t live in Calgary are most likely pretty small.

OK, So what wrong with that?

Let us use the example of a New York Taxi company. Imagine I’m a searcher who’s booking a taxi in New York City. I would strongly wager that he needs a cab now, but what about an out of State searcher flying in from Texas, chances are he’s rate shopping, or only in the planning stage.

Which click is more valuable to the taxi company? Some would say I’m making a mountain out of a mole hill. I think ultimately this decision should be the customers call or the advertiser not an automated system.

Logically we would design our campaign for New York City & then design a separate campaign for outside of New York City, but let us make that decision.

The present policy forces advertisers to spend money on clicks they do not want, no matter how small the amount it adds up. This is unfair and unwanted. Yes it’s a small amount of clicks, but it’s my money! If Google and Yahoo feel it’s relevant, let them pay the click costs!

Enquisite http://www.enquisite.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/enq-auditor-datasheet.pdf
estimates about 3% of campaign traffic falls outside campaign parameters. But this is one of those situations, which we should be able to opt in or opt out. (Reminds me of Expanded Broad Matching)

What GOOGLE says about breaking Geo Targets.

Yahoo is only playing the tune set by Google, more fine print.

http://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35435

Brian Carter covered the Google Angle.
He estimated that between 20%-30% of his traffic was unwanted or redundant.

What BING (Microsoft) says about breaking Geo Targets.

The surprising twist is BING, does not do this!

Michelle Fernandes Datey – Search Media Strategist, adCenter Canada

To answer your question:

No – anyone outside NY and NJ will not be served ads, if you have targeted only these 2 states. (irrespective of what they type in).

If you ever do find out that adCenter does that – do bring it to the attention of your account rep immediately!

1. Assuming that the adCenter campaign is EXCLUSIVELY and not INCREMENTALLY geo targeted to NY/NJ, no ads should be served to users from other states.
2. If the IP address for the Texas user is being redirected to a NY IP address, then it IS possible for the Texan to be served the NY ad. This happens sometimes when servers are elsewhere, for example, our NY office gets a Redmond, Washington IP address, since MSFT is headquartered there.
3. If you have a campaign that is NOT targeted to NY and it has keywords such as ‘day spa’, then due to the broad matching of ‘day spa’, the ad could be shown in Texas, if the word ‘new York day spa’ is searched. (That is normal Broad behavior, no problems)

Now What?

Hey Google and Yahoo, why don’t you create an opt in /opt out call it
Expanded (Micro?) Geo-Targeting. Everybody is now happy. The average advertiser would never click off the option. Now Google/Yahoo you would continue to get those relevant clicks and the rest of us could continue to get targeting we paid for. Congratulations Bing on doing it right the first time. Besides does Google & Yahoo enjoy giving out credits to click collection companies like Enquisite? Having worked in payables its no fun dealing with customers fighting over bills, don’t your technical staff have better things to do than go over customer log files.

Do the right thing.

I was surprised to learn that GMAIL has become the #3 most often used email provider.
Last August Comscore reported on unique user traffic (USA only) the big four email domains in July 2009 were:

• Yahoo! Mail – 106 million
• Windows Live Hotmail – 47 million
• Gmail – 37 million
• AOL Mail – 36.4 million

So the following must be true:

1. Your competition has a mailing list which they send out.
2. Chances are some of those prospects get those emails on GMAIL and read them.
3. Google allows you to directly target GMAIL on the placement network.
4. Some of those subscribers may actually forward the message to other GMAIL email users (bonus).

Here’s what you do:

1. Subscribe to your competitor’s mailing list. Make a note if the competition requires the user to qualify your registration, this will help you better target this type of channel.
2. When you get an email, you must work fast – as the email will most likely be picked up in next 24-48 hours.
3. Check the keyword density of the email message, note the URL’s and other key identifiers of the email. Company names, products & services. You should be able to easily extract a keyword list. Use a maximum of about 50 keywords or phrases.
4. In the Google Content Network create a Placements only Group – Text Ads. To target Gmail only enter manually: mail.google.com (Which is the GMAIL location) Name the group by the header of the email – and the date. PS: I truly believe Google looks at your group names for semantic purposes to better target your Ads so make sure you do this word for word.
5. Your bid should be fairly high, for maximum chance of exposure, since you know these are more qualified prospects, this is not the time to be shy. You should tag this group, so your analytics package can identifier clicks & impressions “competitor prospects”.
6. Your AD text should address the email directly; use keywords from the header of the email. Don’t bother with Dynamic Keyword Insertion (DKI). It doesn’t work on the content network.
7. Repeat these steps with every email! Yes there will be repetition but the Content Network does not penalize you for duplicate keywords across ADGROUPS on the Content Network, as opposed to Google Network & Google Search Network.
8. Optional: If you can build a landing page fast enough to directly address the email this would be a bonus.

Eventually you are going to build a comprehensive list of words based on your competitions email blasts. It will be easy to notice patterns and act on them. If your competitive intelligence is correct you will be able to get a sense on how many people are viewing his emails on the Gmail channel!

If any of you out there know technique for doing this YAHOO MAIL or MSN on those respective networks, let us know.

Searchengineman

Kudos:

I would like to thank Perry Marshall for Tweeting out the initial tip.

And Dan Spransy for his video which inspired this.

In the last 48 hours I’ve notice on my Google Wave Account(s) have both had an increase of 8 more invites. I have two accounts, the one I received during the initial phase. The second one had no invites. Today I’ve noticed that each account had been credited with 8 more invites. If you a Google Wave account, now is the time to exact heavy favours!

Happy Waving.

Searchengineman.

If you’ve been under a rock and don’t know what Google Wave is:
Google Wave Hype How Far Will People Go to Get an Invite