Web advertising goes local. Finally!

I just hate when I prove myself wrong! Which happens with increasing frequency these days as new technology is constantly introducing (or perhaps more accurately, bombarding) itself into our daily lives. As forward-thinking as I like to think I am, I instinctively fight these new advances with statements of “this is of no use to me!”

Yet, inevitably, I embrace them and soon find myself at a loss without them. And so it goes with new media opportunities that stem from the new technology. When a media rep phones to set an appointment to present the latest new media I cringe and even, dare I say, mumble, don’t we have enough media already!!”

And so I find it a bit odd that I have skipped all of my usual early denial and posturing and moved right into downright excitement at the new geo, contextual and behavioral targeting opportunities for local and regional advertisers. National advertisers have long had at their disposal the ability and budget to advertise on the major search engines and a broad spectrum of popular websites to reach their target audiences. Meanwhile, local advertisers have been extremely limited, with largely their local newspaper, TV and radio station websites as the only options. But times are a changing!

Several months ago Yahoo! entered into partnerships with newspapers across the country to provide local advertisers accessibility to their network of sites. By integrating their technology platform with the newspapers’, Yahoo! has significantly expanded the online reach for local advertisers.

In our local market, the Palm Beach Post’s online reach increased from 26% to 67% with the addition of Yahoo!. In addition, Yahoo! offers geographic and behavioral targeting, a huge improvement in strategic placement. Advertisers can now place their banners in front of advertisers who exhibit online behavior in sync with their products and services. For example we have used geo and behavioral targeting (BT) with a hospital client to promote their stroke and cardiac services to online users in Palm Beach County. These are users who have surfed the Yahoo! family of sites for health information, specifically related to the circulatory system. We saw increases in the click-through rates from when we were only able to target specific channels within the Palm Beach Post’s website.

And perhaps even more exciting are ad networks that bundle websites, blogs, RSS feeds, etc and sell them to advertisers in packages, simplifying the buying process. Now with one media buy, advertisers can place their ads on hundreds of the most popular sites. And, contextual targeting allows the advertiser to further target their banner placements by areas of interest that relate to their product/service. Ad networks have been around for a while. But again they were not really accessible to local advertisers because of minimum spend requirements that priced them out of consideration.

But now, local advertisers can conveniently and affordably access local ad space across networks of nationally-recognized popular websites as well as a mix of relevant niche sites. A small sample of the hundreds of sites available include CNN, New York Magazine, Readers Digest, Business Week, Facebook, LinkedIn, Major League Baseball, Auto Trader and Men’s Fitness. And remarketing technology allows advertisers to follow online users who click on their banner ad and surf their website by tagging them and then serving their banner ads to them as they continue to surf the web for the next few days.

So, yeah….I am ecstatic about these new opportunities with no hesitancy or uncertainty about the value they bring our clients. Bring it on!!