Geotargeting: targeting your inventory towards geographic regions. The concept of geotargeting has been a mainstay feature in online ad management for some time now. It makes sense to match impressions with the companies that will pay the most for that geographic region.

That being the case, RMX Direct had to address this need, so we added this feature in under our “Manage Tab”: the place where you traffic in your 3rd party deals. Geotargeting for a placement is just one of a number features under the manage tab that augment the usefulness of making another network compete with our RMX Direct networks.

Now, with all features, their power can help–or hurt– your efforts…and it all depends on how you use it.

With that, I decided to invite our RMX Direct team member Luke Walsh to talk about geotargeting. He’s our head analyst and has had a hand in all things RMX Direct for almost two years.

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Vince Panero (VP): Luke, we all know geotargeting is powerful. Really quickly, as a publisher: how can it hurt you? How can it help you?

Luke: Geotargeting helps you match impression type to campaign type for a higher CPM. It can only hurt you if you match one batch of geotargeted impressions to the wrong networks or network campaigns. Since most non-RMX networks won’t report their geotargeting, you’ll need some history with the network, or a contact at the network who can tell you where most of the campaigns are targeted. You can also test the network by geotargeting their placement and checking CPM and revenue after a several days.You don’t want to over-geotarget. If you have no reason to target a country or region because you don’t have any non-RMX advertisers for that region, don’t bother.

VP: With that, what’s a few scenarios of using geotargeting?

Luke: Many publishers learn that, for various reasons, US visitors provide them with the highest CPM. So they will target placements specifically to US impressions and auction those separately from International impressions.

Some publishers geotarget in order to test what a network will pay for impressions from a specific country or region.

VP: First, someone who is a smaller sized publisher who’s new to RMX Direct. What’s an example of a smart set-up?

Luke: With few impressions to auction off, geotargeting may not be the best approach for a small publisher. For some sites, Adsense has earned a reputation for paying competitive CPMs for international impressions. Yahoo Publishers Network prefers that publishers geotarget impressions sent so that they receive only US impressions. With RMX Direct, a publisher could run both contextual campaigns in an auction with RMX Direct networks and still abide by Google’s Terms of Service regarding competitive placements on the same page.

VP: So, how does that differ from someone who is a little bigger? A publisher with millions of impressions/day?

Luke: Larger publishers often have an incentive to geotarget to specific regions because they have far more impressions to auction off. A large one might use RMX Direct to learn where most of their impressions come from, which country, and focus their efforts to auction off the impressions from that country or region first, and so on down the line.

VP: Thanks, Luke, for the tips.

Feel free to play around with this feature–and all the features we’ve added to the “Manage” tab– to help you get the most out of your website’s revenue potential.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 27th, 2006 at 10:00 pm and is filed under Direct Media Exchange. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.