Yahoo announced new capabilities this week for Yahoo Search Marketing: zip code targeting, day parting, and demographic bidding.  These may not be any extraordinarily new technologies that we see, but it excites us that Yahoo has come into them.  You can set these targeting options at the campaign or the ad group level, and their new icons display upon logging in to your Yahoo account and viewing the campaigns under a new column entitled “Targeting.”

Geo-targeting is not new to Yahoo, but they’ve enhanced their capabilities.  Previously, one could target by country, state, or down to the city level.  Now, you may target by zip code.  This is becoming a necessity for many advertisers who do not wish to reach the nation, but instead very specific markets.   In related news, Joe just informed me that Miva is now capable of targeting at the country level.  Whoa!  Slow down there Miva.

Ad scheduling, also known as day parting, is another useful addition to Yahoo Search Marketing.  This works well for clients with business or call center hours that are only open for part of the day; or for clients who are on a tight budget and want to ensure that their ads show during the busiest time of the day, rather than exhausting their budget early in the day.  Many clients currently use Google’s day parting feature, so we will most likely test Yahoo’s version with them soon.

Finally, Yahoo has rolled out demographic targeting.  This targeting applies to both Sponsored and Content Match, and is executed by setting additional bids for certain demographics.  This would be most effective if you have a specific age or gender target audience that is worth more for their traffic.  Otherwise, it may not be worth it to set higher bids for a demographic that may or may not be more beneficial to you.

I’m glad to see that Yahoo is implementing new technologies that we have come to take advantage of in Google.  This will hopefully help with the performance of our Yahoo accounts as we come closer to targeting all the right people, at the right time, in the right place.

Photo “Snail on Target” by jaysk

Most recent posts by Kate

• Google Earth Place Pages - December 11th, 2009
• Google Ad Sitelinks - November 13th, 2009
• ‘Tis the Season for PPC - October 30th, 2009
• Paid Search Site Targeting and Exclusion - September 18th, 2009
• Microsoft adCenter Placement Reports - August 21st, 2009

1. Greg Says:
   March 24th, 2009 at 5:11 pm

   Hilarious. Love the shot at Miva and the Snail photo.. perfect. It’s about time Yahoo rolled out these new features and hanks for letting us all know about them. I’m mostly stoked about the Yahoo day parting feature as that’s something I’ve heavily loved as a Google option.