Search Engine Tigers

Geo targeting is the ability to deliver your PPC ads to a certain geographical location, with the ad being seen by a user if it’s determined that their IP address puts them in that geographical location. Of course this doesn’t always work, with certain ISPs showing users across the country to be in incorrect locations, such as Ashburn, VA, or somewhere in Florida, but for the most part it works fairly well.

So how do you go about setting up your campaign to geo target? Well, with Google, when you create an account you are given the option of selecting to geo target to countries, states, cities, or even by drawing a boundary on a map.

The new Yahoo (Panama) gives you a graphical map, that colors in the state or DMA selected, very pretty, and very useful.

…and MSN adcenter? Eek, it’s scary. The geo targeting option allows you to select multiple cities from a list. The list is ordered alphabetically by city. There’s no way to sort it any other way, such as by state, so if you want to target several cities in New Jersey, you have to hunt and peck to find those that you’re either looking for, or that may be close to the location you want. Oh, and you can’t target an entire state, the closest you can go is finding all the cities in that state.

With Panama boosting Yahoo, MSN Adcenter has really fallen to the back of the queue. Time for Microsoft to do something about it?

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