Stuart Corner
Wednesday, 11 July 2007 06:43
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Yahoo! Search Marking has launched its new search engine advertising system in Australia. It takes targeting of search-based advertising to a new level and shows how Internet advertising is rapidly increasing in sophistication and targeting ability.
Yahoo! claims to have "created the search advertising industry" almost a decade ago and, according to Craig Wax, managing director of Yahoo! Search Marketing in Australia this is the system it is still running with until it migrates all its accounts to the new system.
The current system serves the same ads to every user in Australia and New Zealand. The new system, code named Panama, will allow advertisers to refine delivery to 35 regions within Australia and 16 in New Zealand and within those even to the level of individual suburbs.
According to Yahoo! SM this feature "leverages Yahoo! Search Marketing WhereonEarth technology, which draws from 15 years of geo-targeting expertise to enable Yahoo! Search Marketing to more accurately understand and match to user search intent and colloquial terms."
Wax explained that, at present, targeting is not 100 percent reliable. As a first approximation the user's IP address is used but where available Yahoo! SM's systems use other information: if users are registered with Yahoo! or if they have made location specific searches, such as looking for a plumber in a particular suburb.
In the long term, he said, Yahoo! SM hoped that users would see the benefit in receiving appropriately targeted advertising and would provide their location information.
The new system will allow advertisers to experiment with a variety of advertising content to see which produces the best results, as measured by 'click-through' rate. They will submit up to 20 different variants of their creative material for a particular campaign. It will use all of these in turn measuring the 'click through' response rate to each one and eliminating the least popular versions until it eventually displays only the most popular versions.
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