Geotargeting on Project Wonderful is only a few days old, and in that time a few questions about it have landed in our inbox more often than others. We thought it might help to put the answers to these questions here, in case you’ve been wondering them too!

I’ve approved some new bids on my ad box, but I don’t see them when I visit my site. Why?

That’s because if you’re looking at your site, you’ll only see the ads for the region that you’re in right now! If you’ve approved ads for another region, you can see those bids in two ways. The first is on your ad box’s information page, found by clicking your “your ad here” text or by clicking on the icon next to each ad box on your My ad boxes page. The other is, of course, by looking at the list of winning bids on your Bids on my ad box page!

The average bid in the US region of my ad box is dropping. Am I losing income?

Most likely not! When we introduced the geotargeting, all existing bids and campaigns were set to the US region, and all traffic prior to the update was credited to the US region.  So, the average bid for your entire ad box was initially being attributed to the US region.

Traffic is now being tracked in all regions, so bids are being distributed accordingly. While the average bid in the US region is dropping, you’ll notice that the average bid in other regions is rising. The average bid for your entire ad box should be at about the same level it has always been — and hopefully even higher! With geotargeting, earnings per ad box are up across the network.

Bids are appearing on my ad box for less than my minimum bid. What’s going on?

When we introduced the geotargeting, all existing bids and campaigns were set to the US region, and all traffic prior to the update was credited to the US region.  This was done because regional traffic data wasn’t previously stored, and the US is our main source of page views!

When it came to minimum bids, we figured if that you already had a minimum bid of, say, $1, you wouldn’t want to see that minimum duplicated across the new regions — that would mean that your minimum bids across all four regions would add up to $4, four times what it was the day before! We also didn’t want to split your minimum bid across the regions, because then your minimum bid on US traffic would be suddenly reduced, and that wouldn’t make many people happy. Rather than try to guess how each publisher would want the minimum split, minimum bids on your ad boxes were also set to the US region, and haven’t been copied to the new regions. As such, the bids you’re seeing for less than your minimum bid are on the new regions.

But it’s easy to update! You can shift your minimum bids across regions by going to My ad boxes→”Edit”→”Minimum bids”. Different minimum bids can be set for each region.

I’m the high bidder on a site, but someone else’s ad is appearing there when I visit. What’s going on?

When you’re visiting a site, you’ll only see the ads for the region you’re right now, even if your ad is for another region.  But you can see the winning bids for all regions on each ad box’s information page, found by the icon next to each bid on your My bids page! You can also sort your bids by region there too, so you’ll always be certain when and where your ad is appearing.

I don’t really care where my visitors come from. How do I target everyone?

Good news: the default behaviour of the site is designed specifically for advertisers like you, who want to reach anyone, anywhere!

The publisher search returns summed traffic across all regions, just like before, unless you specify otherwise. So you’ll be seeing the same traffic numbers and site statistics that you were seeing before geotargeting! On the bidding page you can enter a single maximum bid for whatever regions you’re interested in, and the default is all of them! If you’re not seeing this option, make sure that the “Add traffic together” checkbox, located just above the charts, is checked off. But again, if you’re searching with the default options, it’s already checked off for you!

Our system will split your maximum bid across regions for you and display the results on your bid confirmation screen, where you can edit them if you want. All four bids will be placed at the same time, so you don’t have to go through the bid process four times for each ad box. The result is geotargeted bids, across regions, without having to do any more work!

My old bids are currently in the US region, but I want to reach every visitor. How do I reset my bids to apply everywhere?

While each bid applies to only one region, it’s really easy to convert an existing bid into multiple bids that span across regions! Just go to My bids and click on the “edit” link next to the bid you want to change. Look under the flags in the region settings section, and click the blue “duplicate it across regions” link!

The maximum bid you had set on the original bid will be intelligently splits across all of the regions for the ad box. You’ll have a chance to review the split and make any changes before the new bids are placed.

When I try to place my bid everywhere and let Project Wonderful decide my regional bids, some regions are getting excluded. Why?

When you place a single maximum bid across all regions, we’ll split that maximum bid across the regions you’ve chosen for you and display the result on the confirmation screen for you. The split is determined by the relative traffic in each region. But, if one or more regions do not have enough traffic relative to the total to justify at least a bid of $0.01/day, the system won’t place a bid there.

The split is displayed on a confirmation page before your bid is finalized, so you can go back and make changes if you would like to split the bid differently and include one of those dropped regions.

Does geotargeting mean that ads will now cost me 4x as much?

It doesn’t, although this was a common reaction when geotargeting first went up and people noticed the US region’s current bids were about the same price as the current bids on the entire ad box before. However, it’s important to keep in mind that the overall traffic on a site hasn’t changed. Since this is one of the main factors people consider when setting their bids, advertisers aren’t going to be willing to pay four times as much for the same amount traffic!

If you’re familiar with how stock splits work, then you likely already understand how the prices are going to adjust. If not, we’ll explain what we mean!

Let’s say a site’s traffic breaks down as being the majority (50%) come from the US, only 1% from Canada, 25% from Europe, and 24% from everywhere else. Now, let’s say that, before geotargeting, you were bidding $1/day there. Sure, on day one of geotargeting your bid in the US region was still set to $1/day — the same was true for everyone’s bids! But, as a rational advertiser, are you really going to keep paying full price for half the traffic? Probably not, and you probably also aren’t going to pay $1/day for that tiny 1% sliver of Canadian traffic either.

Instead, as advertisers log in and update their bids, prices in each region will shift. As an advertiser aiming to pay the same price for the entire ad box’s traffic, your bids are going to be $0.50/day in the US, $0.01/day in Canada, $0.25/day in Europe and $0.24/day in the elsewhere region.

This analysis, of course, ignores the fact that some advertisers are going to be willing to pay a premium to reach an audience in a particular single region. If you’ve got a product that only ships to the United States, for example, US traffic is worth way more to you than European traffic. So while prices will rise a bit in the new regions, there’s no way it’s going to be anything as dramatic as paying full price for each new region!

That covers most of it! If you’ve got any questions that we haven’t addressed here, or any feedback at all, please do drop us a line. And thanks again for being Project Wonderful members!

Alright! Geotargeting is now up on Project Wonderful. It’s been pretty well tested, but drop us a line if you run into anything unusual, or if anything doesn’t seem to be working as it should!

Publishers: Don’t worry if your new regions are empty right now. All your bids are still there in the US region, earning just as much as they did yesterday! The new regions will be filled up over the next few days as advertisers start bidding on them.

Advertisers: This is a great time to start bidding on these new regions! It’s a new advertising territory just WAITING for you.

I think that’s it! Thanks again everyone for being a Project Wonderful member. You guys are great!

Late tomorrow night (well, actually, early Sunday morning at around 12:30 am!) we’ll start the upgrades on Project Wonderful. In this time access to the website will be limited for a bit, but ads will still be displayed, clicks counted, and so on! A few hours later, Project Wonderful will be back — now with geotargeting enabled!

For simplicity’s sake, the traffic statistics on Project Wonderful from before the rollover will be credited to US traffic, which is historically our largest traffic source. And when we do roll over, all existing bids and campaigns will be set to the US region.

There’s a few advantages to doing it this way: it makes the rollover simple for both advertisers and publishers, and allows the three new regions to be virgin territory for advertisers come Sunday morning! It does mean that US traffic will *appear* to take a dip when geotargeting begins – since after the rollover only actual US traffic will be counted, while before it ALL traffic was counted – but this is a minor effect that will disappear within a month.

If you’d like your existing bids to be active on a different region, you can edit them when log in Sunday morning. And of course, you can always set your bids to expire Saturday ngiht if you *really* don’t want them active on the US region at all, though it shouldn’t be that big of a deal — they’re already active on US traffic as is, remember! You can recreate them Sunday morning using the “duplicate bid” functionality already built into Project Wonderful.

Existing campaigns will also be active on US traffic only, which may narrow their focus. Like bids, you can edit them Sunday morning to take advantage of the new geotargeting options. And again, if you really don’t want a few hours of US geotargeting, you can edit them to temporarily not be active Saturdays or Sundays.

Happy bidding!

Here we’ll be looking at how geotargeting will be affecting our members.

A lot of the effects are pretty obvious: advertisers will be happy with new and better ways to target their advertising! For publishers, though, the effects are a bit more subtle. Sure, each publisher now has geotargeted ad boxes on their sites, but what does that really mean?

For that, we’ll go back to some basic economics.

As you may have realized, advertising functions in a supply and demand system. You (as a publisher) have the supply, and advertisers represent demand. If you’ve got one advertising spot and two advertisers, then they compete for the space, and that drives the price of advertising on your site up! In contrast, if you’ve got twenty advertising spots and two advertisers, then you’ve flooded the market, and your advertising will probably go for really cheap.

When you apply to become a publisher, we check out your site, and when you’re approved we let you place up to five different advertising areas on your site. One of the reasons we have this ceiling is to help guide new publishers! Early on we had publishers who got over-enthusiastic and put way too many ads all over the place. This is like flooding the market with supply – plus, you’ve diluted the value of advertising on your page even more by putting so many ads on it. Any advertiser has to now also compete with every other ad on the page.

With geotargeting, each ad box is now actually four separate auctions: one for Canadian traffic, one for American traffic, one for European traffic and one for the rest of the world. Isn’t the flooding the market with supply? The answer is no, not really. There’s not actually four times the ads appearing on your site, because only one is showing at a time to a given viewer. Plus, each regional auction is a different SORT of product, with a different value. Someone who wants to advertise to Canadians isn’t like to be interested in the European market as someone in Italy is.

Imagine an ad box that get 100,000 hits/day and gets bids of about $100/day. And let’s assume, because it makes the math easy, that through fantastic chance, each region gets exactly the same amount of traffic. Here’s what you’d expect to happen!

• America gets 25,000 hits at $25/day,
• Canada gets 25,000 hits at $25/day,
• Europe gets 25,000 hits at $25/day,
• and traffic from everywhere gets 25,000 hits at $25/day.

For publishers, this is great, because they’re earning just as much as they did as before – and this is assuming that not a single advertiser is willing to pay a premium for regional traffic, which seems unlikely. There’s an important mental change happening for advertisers here too: they can get a day of regional traffic on your site for only $25, which is a much smaller number than the $100 they were facing before! Of course, if they wanted to buy ALL regions, it would still cost them $100 – but this smaller number is psychologically important. It seems cheaper, and it lets advertisers test the water without having to place a (maybe scary?) $100 bid.

So that’s good too! That’s two factors that work to make regional traffic more valuable than merged traffic.

There is, however, one scenario where geotargeting could hurt certain publishers, and we wanted to make sure it was clear and obvious, so that if you find yourself in this scenario, you can preemptively take care of it. If you’re a publisher with extremely low bids on your ad box, you could end up in a scenario where, before geotargeting, an advertiser was willing to pay 1 cent a day to be on your ad box, but after geotargeting, they’re less willing. Why? Because one cent is the lowest an advertiser can bid, and with your traffic now split across four regions, advertisers might not think it’s worth at least a penny per region to bid on your site.

Are you pooched?

Well, not really. We made a simplifying assumption above that regional traffic is split evenly: in real life, it’s really unlikely that this would be the case. It’s actually way more likely that one or two regions would make up the bulk of the traffic – which means that the region we’re getting our traffic from will maintain demand and stay at that 1 cent a day!

So that’s good – that helps us! In the vast majority of cases, these ad boxes that are already earning a cent a day will continue to do so. And in our remaining regions, where bidding is low, we can supplement with custom “Your ad here” images. These images can either either encourage bidding, or link to other places you’ve chosen: maybe to your shop, for example. You can choose a different “your ad here” image and link for each region, which is handy!

And if you’re a publisher who still thinks there might be problems, you can always try consolidating your ad boxes. By dropping the number of locations available on your site and reduce the number of spots available in each ad box, you’re increasing the value of your page: each change reduces the supply, which means that advertisers who want this advertising will pay more. You can also put your ad box on more pages of your web site, and the increased exposure will help increase its intrinsic value.

So, this is the one boundary case that you may want to be aware of. The vast majority of our publishers should have no issue, and the added value geotargeting gives advertisers will translate to higher bids on their sites. If you find yourself in the worst-case scenario we described above, consolidating your ad boxes now will increase the value of advertising on your site, and help you out. It’s worth doing, as too much supply means that your ad boxes may not perform as they should!

The biggest change to the interface of Project Wonderful (now with geotargeting!) is to the “advertise here” page – this is the page that tells advertisers about a site, and lets publishers check up on how their site is performing. With geotargeting we’ve redesigned the site: not only to make it more functional, but also to allow you to place bids faster and easier!

Here’s what the new page looks like. Take a look at that big image to get a sense of the lay of the land, and then we’ll go over the changes one by one!

First off, the page design has been cleaned up, with the goal of making it both a prettier page, and one in which it’s easier to find the information you’re looking for. And since now there can be different high bidders in different region, you can click on a region’s flag to see the winning bids – and what they’re bidding – in each region! Here’s a clip (and yep, it’s supposed to be cut off):

Here, you can see that we’re displaying the winning bids on Canadian traffic, with the winning bids on other regions just a click away. When you click to see the winning bids in a different region, they appear without having you to reload the page — which speeds up browsing! Traffic and bid data is available too, only now, you can choose which regions you want to see!

Check off the regions you’re interested in, and the charts refresh in real time. And, again, you can see either totals graphed (as above), or the data for each region graphed separately.

All that’s left is to place a bid, which is the purpose of that box at the right of the page:

A few changes here: when you choose an ad it’s shown to you right away, which can help prevent mistakes. Here I selected my ad nicknamed “shocked”, and it’s displayed automatically — it’s that orange :-0 face beneath the ad selection. We’ve also tucked away some bid options that are less commonly used, but they’re still available to you (and there’s a new option in your profile to make them always displayed by default). Here’s what they look like expanded:

The only wrinkle left is bidding on different regions! There’s two ways you can do this. If you want to simply say “I’m want to pay $5 a day to have my ad on each of these regions”. then what we’ve displayed above is perfect for you. You simply enter a single maximum bid and, when you’re ready, hit submit. We automatically (and intelligently!) divide up your total bid among the regions you’ve chosen, and these are then displayed for your confirmation.

But if you’re interested in managing these region bids by yourself, you can do that too! Just check off the “show traffic by region” checkbox and you’ll see this (assuming you’re interested in bidding in every region, of course!):

This allows you complete control over your bidding. This page follows our design philosophy of making things as simple as possible, while still allowing you to get down to the nuts and bolts if and when you want to.

Finally, when you’re ready, you’ll be presented with a confirmation page which shows the bid you’re about to make. If you entered in your regional bids by hand, they’ll be displayed here. If you entered a single maximum bid instead, you’ll see the regional bids that Project Wonderful figured out for you — and, of course, you can always go back and tweak things if you like:

That’s it! When you submit your bid, you’ll be informed of whether you’re the current high bidder or not, just as before — the only difference is, now, you’ll find out for each region you bid in. A bid is placed in each region you selected, and you can manage each of these bids individually.

Next up we’ll cover some tips and tricks for working with geotargeting!

Today we’ll be looking at what new options geotargeting offers publishers!

In the past, each ad box represented one auction: if you won, your ad was displayed to all audiences. With geotargeting, each ad box actually represents four auctions, one for each region of America, Canada, Europe, and everywhere else.

This means there’s a few changes! You wouldn’t expect every region to have the same performance, so a single minimum bid doesn’t make sense anymore. So, now, you can set a minimum bid for each region! It looks like this:

As before, you need to cancel any existing bids before changing a minimum bid – the only difference is now, it’s localized to a region. If you want to change the minimum bid on a region, you only have to cancel the bids on that region. This will make changing minimum bids less traumatic for publishers, as you won’t have to cancel ALL bids at once. Instead, you can do it a region at a time, to minimize disruption!

(An aside: the reason we don’t let you change minimum bids on the fly is that it’s too prone to abuse: it would allow you to update your minimum bid to be just beneath the current bid’s maximum, thereby draining advertisers of money unfairly. This way, minimums bids are still something serious that are only changed with good reason, and publishers can’t game any existing bids on their ad boxes).

Beyond that, there’s only a few more changes. On your “My Ad Boxes” page, the same ad box performance data is there, only now instead of totals, it’s also broken down by region:

Obviously here we’re using dummy data: in real life you wouldn’t expect one region to have ALL the traffic like that.

The last change is to your “Bids on my ad boxes” page! You can now sort and search these bids by region – and so can all other bid pages throughout Project Wonderful. It’s pretty simple:

Choose what region you want to see, hit “Go!”, and the page is sorted appropriately.

And that’s it! All that’s left for publishers is your “advertise here” page that’s shown to advertisers, and we’ll be looking at that next.

Today we’ll be showing how geotargeting works when advertisers searching for sites to advertise on!

The search page is very similar to how it was in the past, only now there’s a new “Traffic Regions” option group. It looks like this!

Checking off which regions you’re interested in is pretty straightforward: you can choose as many or as few as you like, and we’ll return results that meet this criteria. The next two options are more interesting:

This option controls how the results are presented to you. The default it to graph the data for each region you’ve selected in a single chart. These charts look a lot like what you’re probably already used to:

Here we’ve got two lines: one for displays (blue) and one for uniques (orange), which are summed across regions. But there’s also that “graph each region separately” option, which is there if you’re interested in comparing regional traffic directly. With this option, each region’s information is graphed on a separate line, allowing you to make comparisons quickly:

Regions are colour coded, corresponding to their flags:

• America is blue,
• Canada is red,
• Europe is orange,
• and traffic from everywhere else is green.

The orange for Europe comes from the stars on the flag. It’s a bit of a stretch, but it ensures that all the colours used on the graphs are complementary colours, which means that no matter which regions you choose, the colour combinations will be pleasing to the eye!

Next up are these options:

They control which results are returned and how they’re displayed. By default, we only return the particular regions of an ad box that meet your criteria. If you’ve got traffic or bidding thresholds, for example, it’s possible not all regions in an ad box will met them — with this option, we’ll only return the regions that do. This is generally the most useful setting!

But you can change this option to “Return all regions”. With this option set, if any region meets your criteria, we’ll return that region, as well as ALL other regions for that ad box. This is useful if you’d like to buy out all regions of a site at once, either by hand or in a campaign!

Finally, when you hit the search button, you’ll see the results page is much the way it was before. All that’s changed is a “Regions” column that shows which regions met your criteria:

Everything else is exactly the same, with the exception that, now, the traffic and bid totals reflect only the regions that met your criteria.

In the above example, the site has 342,860 average page views over the past five days – on Canadian traffic, that is! If more regions had been returned, there’d be more flags here, and the numbers would reflect their total. If we’d selected “Graph each region separately”, instead of totals there’d be separate, region-specific traffic and bid values here instead. This allows you to compare the numbers between regions quickly and easily!

That’s pretty much it – nothing too too major here! Just a few different ways to view and flip through the new information we’re presenting. Next we’ll look at the changes from the publisher’s perspective!

We’ve been busy these past few months, upgrading the network behind-the-scenes for our newest feature: geotargeting!

What is geotargeting?
Geotargeting allows you to target your ads to different areas of the planet. If you’re selling a product to Americans, you can now make sure only Americans see your ads. Or Canadians. Or Europeans, if you want. It’s pretty awesome.

How does it work?
When a reader loads a page with a Project Wonderful ad on it, we compare their IP address with our geodatabase, which matches country codes to IP address. Then we show them the appropriate ad for their region!

What are the benefits?
There’s several. As an advertiser, you can target your ads more effectively than before. As a publisher, you get more revenue streams, as well as different and distinct audiences to sell to publishers. And viewers of websites get ads that are more relevant to them, so that’s good too!

What’s changing?
There’s a few changes: most of them under-the-hood, but several that you’ll see. Each bid will now have a region associated with it! When you bid, you can choose to bid on one or more (or all!) of:

• American traffic
• Canadian traffic
• European traffic
• or traffic from everywhere else!

Where’d these regions come from?
We looked at a few factors: where our greatest audiences were in, and what distinctions would be the most useful for advertisers. The US/Canada division is a big one, and one that had been most often asked for from advertisers on both sides of the 49th parallel. Europe is another large block, with “everywhere else” taking up the rest.

While this new geotargeting won’t allow you to target, say, particular countries within Europe or particular provinces within Canada, it does allow you to target these larger groups in a way that’s convenient, simple, and that makes sense.

When is it happening?
We’re rolling over on Saturday, the 30th of January – just before the end of the month. That evening, Project Wonderful will be upgraded, and the next day, the 31st, the last day of January, will be the first day of New Improved Project Wonderful, now with geotargeting!

This sounds complicated. Is it complicated?
Nope! We’ve taken a lot of time to make sure our interface is actually as simple as possible. And if you’re not interested in geotargeting at all (and that’s fair!) you can ignore it and bid as before: searching will work the same way, and if you want to bid $10 a day on a site, we’ll automatically (and intelligently!) break that into regional bids for you, behind the scenes.

What do I have to do?
Nothing!  After the rollover on Saturday, January 30th, you’ll be able to choose which regions you want your bids to be active in. Until then just sit tight, and be sure to come back here for more previews, tips and tricks about the new geotargeting features!

We’re announcing this feature well in advance for a few reasons: we didn’t want it to be a surprise, and we wanted all our members to be able to hit the ground running on January 31st. In the next few days we’ll not only show you what the updates look like, but we’ll be posting tutorials on how to bid with regions, tips and tricks on how to maximize your bidding, and so on.

Come back soon, and thanks for being Project Wonderful members!

(Oh – the sweet flag icons above were supplied by Icon Drawer – thanks guys!)

We hope you and yours had an awesome 2009, and here’s to an even more wonderful 2010! We’re living in the future now.

Project Wonderful will be running over the holidays, of course, but responses to customer service questions may be a bit longer than usual, and if you’re applying to become a new publisher, the wait there may be a bit longer than usual too.

Thank you all for being members! More rad features are on their way soon, which we’ll be talking about here in early January. All the best!

Author and thinker Seth Godin had a recent post on ad clicks: the bottom line is that all ad clicks come from 16% of internet users, and most come from 4%.

What does this matter? If you’re optimizing your ads for clicks, you are overfitting your ads to appeal to 16% of the internet and ignoring the other 84%. It’s something to keep in mind when viewing your click performance stats, and one of the reasons we sell advertising based on time, instead of clicks or displays.