expertSEM

An ongoing pet peeve of the PPC Handyman is the tendency of two major search engines, Yahoo and MSN, to overstate their capabilities when it comes to their PPC advertising programs. There is perhaps no better example than Yahoo’s geographic targeting features.

Yahoo sings the praises of its Geographic Targeting for it’s ability to show ads only to individuals within a concise area. This would be an ideal solution for a local business, but before we get ahead of ourselves, let’s see how it works, shall we?

Assume I want to target Los Angeles, I simply enter my zip code, select a twenty mile radius surrounding that zip code and Yahoo gives me the following Geographic Area:

For anyone not familiar with the geography of California, this area provided by yahoo represents about 34,000 square miles, while the area I want to target, the city of Los Angeles comprises only 498 square miles of this region. You might be able to imagine a scenario where this could waste your money. For instance, if I am a local business advertising in L.A., it is not likely that someone in Bishop, CA (4 hours, two mountain ranges and a desert distant from L.A.) will stop into my store. In fact, Reno, Nevada is closer to Bishop than Los Angeles.

I have pointed this out to my reps at Yahoo Search Marketing, and they agree that the targeting is not as specific as it could be. While I thank them for their agreement, this system has been in place for 8 months, and nothing has changed for targeting in that period. While it may be sufficient for Yahoo to call it a day at good enough, there is another firm out there that doesn’t stop there, and goes above and beyond at every stage: Google.

Without revealing any of my trade secrets, I will just say that my firm successfully isolates our Google advertising for local businesses to the city limits we define, both nationally and internationally.

At trade shows, I’ve been told by Yahoo reps about how Google is 20% too expensive because advertisers are concentrated on a stagnant inventory of searches. Well Yahoo, when you can screen out 30% of irrelevant clicks through their vastly more sophisticated geo-targeting, Google still comes out on top.

Until Yahoo provides marketers with the tools we have come to expect (specific geo-targeting, advanced day parting), they will always be playing second fiddle to Google’s virtuoso.