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Yahoo! Search Marketing has rolled out new audience targeting capabilities that can help you reach more of the audience you want at the right time and right place. The new demographic targeting, ad scheduling (dayparting), and enhanced ZIP code-level geo-targeting allow you to segment and tailor marketing messages to the audiences that are most valuable to you.

Demographic targeting: You can now select your desired audiences on Yahoo! sites—in both Sponsored Search and Content Match—by age and gender, and automatically adjust your bids when they find a match for your targeting preferences. Demographic targeting uses a new feature bid adjustments, which lets you specify a premium bid amount for desired audience segments, without losing other traffic volume.

Ad scheduling or day parting: If the people you most want to reach are only online at certain times of the day, or your business is only open during certain hours, you can select the time of day and day of the week during which you’d like your campaigns to run. You can schedule ads to be shown according to users’ time zones or your account’s time zone. Ad scheduling can be applied to both Sponsored Search and Content Match, and at the campaign or ad group level.

ZIP code-level geo-targeting: An update to the existing ZIP code-level targeting feature, advertisers now have even more control about how geo-targeting is used. You can mix and match geo-targeting settings at different levels within the same campaign or ad group, and new dynamic mapping features can help you select individual ZIP codes and ZIP codes surrounding them.

Watch this short Audience targeting flash tutorial on Yahoo.

-Brian R.

Why doesn’t Google allow advertisers to buy “Proper Names”? Proper name searches are one of the most popular searches that people do on search engines right? What are five top things that you do on the internet nowadays?

1. Check your email
2. “Google” someone
3. Read news on how McCain is losing in the polls
4. Check your flailing stocks
5. Facebook (has that become a verb yet?)

That is just my list but is probably true to a certain extent. I think I must Google someone at least once a day and people are always looking for lost friends, loved ones, and classmates. Google a while back made a decision to scrub all paid sponsored listings for any “Proper Name” searches. Why would you turn your back on all of the revenue that could be made from those searches? There must be millions of searches a day on people’s names that Google could be monetizing and they use the excuse that users complained that there were paid ads on their names and that Google was invading their privacy. Couldn’t they just create rules around advertising on “Proper Names” so that they weren’t deceptive or confusing as to what the product offering was?

Just imagine how many advertisers would probably like to advertise for Proper Names such as public record companies, White Pages companies, Reunion, Classmates.com, Friends Reunited, Ancestry.com, Genealogy.com, LinkedIn.com, ZoomInfo.com, eBay, Amazon, etc.

Just do a search on Google for “Neil Clark Warren“, shouldn’t there be ads for books on Dr. Warren, links to eHarmony.com, etc. Neil Clark Warren is the founder of a very popular online dating service, eHarmony.com. His name alone probably gets searched 1,000′s of times a month for people doing research on his Relationship Compatibility Test.

Now if you do that same search on Yahoo you will see a full marketplace of ads on Neil Clark Warren and guess who is buying an ad? Yup, Amazon.com and a couple other book stores since he is a published author. Is this finally making any sense to you? The only sense I can gather from it is that Google thinks that they should be able to get you all of the information you need on people in their natural search results even though most of the public record information isn’t crawlable content on most websites.

For full disclosure on the topic, I used to work for a public records company that spent a good deal of money on public name searches and when Google made the decision to remove all proper name searches they weren’t too happy. I currently don’t have a client that buys proper names but still to this day can’t understand why they are still not allowing advertisers to buy generic names. Instead, we have to read IMDB and Wikipedia listings on people if they are important enough to have a page created on their name. Come on Google, get with the program dude.

-Brian R.

I attended Danny Sullivan’s sort of new SMX Advanced conference here in Seattle this week and was walking around the exhibitor areas looking to see if there was anything new to report and the best booth stop of the morning for me was at the Microsoft Advertising booth. I talked to a guy that was super informed on the new MSN adCenter Desktop tool that is currently in Beta right now and he gave me a preview of the tool and I was super excited that MSN beat Yahoo to the punch to match a tool that Google has had in the marketplace for quite sometime now. Here are some features of the adCenter Desktop tool:

Bulk editing bid prices
Bulk editing destination URLs
Ad Group geo-targeting
Uploading changes instantly to your Account
Set and monitor bid and CTR alerts
Keyword research tool and optimization (see monthly search traffic and demographic data for keywords)
Create campaigns with wizard tool
Ability to view and manage multipule accounts

I know you are about as excited as I was to hear this news and you are just about to leave to go search MSN Live for a link on downloading the tool. Here is the link for you:

MSN adCenter Desktop Tool Beta

You can either sign-up online for the pilot or contact your Account Executive to get you access. I know everyone including myself can’t wait for MSN to acquire Yahoo so we can put a dent in Google’s empire on paid search.

MSN also recently updated their Microsoft Advertising logo. I went searching around for the new logo that I first saw in my Account Executive’s signature file on email. It was interesting to see Microsoft’s progression of logos for Adcenter. I have included a few below that I found. Remember that Microsoft launched the MSN butterfly logo way back on Feb. 14th, 2000.