Yahoo! announces new targeting options

Posted by Josh on Tuesday, March 17th, 2009.

Yahoo! has just announced new ways to target particular users:

Demographic Targeting
Ad Scheduling
Enhanced ZIP-level geo-targeting

All of the big three search engines have been offering some version of geographic targeting for some time. Yahoo! finally added rich scheduling functionality, a lot like that offered by AdWords. Microsoft adCenter has offered demographic targeting for some time, and AdWords has rolled out a beta program for the content network only.

What does this mean for advertisers? Certainly geographic targeting helps them focus budget on the best leads, and refinements to this are always welcome. Most businesses will probably find surprisingly little use for ad scheduling as search behavior is self-limiting, and you probably don’t want to turn business away from your website during your off hours. We remain very skeptical of the value of demographic targeting because the search engines only know a little bit of information about a small subset of users, usually subscribers to the respective sites: Yahoo! or MSN Live, and they are assuming those users are providing accurate personal information.