Geotargeting now live!
January 31, 2010 12:43 am announcements, geotargetingAlright! 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!
January 31st, 2010 at 4:10 am
Okay, regarding publishing: All the ad boxes I’ve set up on my german blog are empty now, none of the high-bidding ads are displayed.
Advertising: On the PW page, I can’t find pages which generate traffic from germany anymore – either something’s not right or I’m doing something wrong :/
January 31st, 2010 at 4:26 am
Hi Buf!
Your old high-bidding ads are still being displayed, just to US-traffic only. To see them, check your ad box “advertise here” page and then click on the US flag: they’ll all be there! You’re seeing an empty ad box because your IP is identified as being in one of the new regions, where bidding has just started (they’re only a few hours old, after all!)
For the ad search with countries – I just checked, and yep, it’s not working properly! I’m sorry about that: we’re fixing it now. Region data was reset with this rollover, so it needs to be populated again today. You’ll start to see results appearing today.
January 31st, 2010 at 6:49 am
Aha! That explains it. As a reader (in France), I was freaking out this morning, thinking that my favorite webcomics suddenly found themselves with a bunch of unsold ad space inventory. Oh, well, it allowed me to see interesting custom “your ad here” images (those of GWS and Shortpacked are nice).
January 31st, 2010 at 9:28 am
So, basically, if I understand this new system correctly, advertisers are now going to pay roughly four times as much for the old coverage since they have to place four separate bids to cover the various regions?
Not too good since I spend way more than I take in.
January 31st, 2010 at 12:16 pm
Ah, I think I got it, thanks Ryan!
January 31st, 2010 at 2:10 pm
@Tony – no, advertisers don’t have to pay four times as much for the same coverage! Think of this more like a stock split than anything else: the traffic you’re getting is now divided across four regions, so each of these regions can get it for cheaper. This blog post helps explain it a bit better, and looks at this from several perspectives:
http://www.blogjectwonderful.com/2010/01/effects-of-geotargeting/
And we’ve made it super easy for advertisers to bid across multiple regions at once. It’s not as bad as them having to place four separate bids: when they bid, the default behaviour is to enter a single maximum across ALL regions – then the system slices that up and creates their four regional bids for them! So they get regional coverage without any extra work, which is meant to both to make region targeting as simple as possible for advertisers, and to hide it as much as possible from people who might not actually care that much about it.
January 31st, 2010 at 4:04 pm
It’s a pain in the ass to have to manually update all your boxes to your usual minimum to ALL the regions. Why don’t you guys set the minimum as a default and then change manually for the regions if you want?
January 31st, 2010 at 4:08 pm
@Maritza – We considered it! But it came down to economics: we thought that if you had a minimum bid of $5 already, with geotargeting you’d probably want a TOTAL minimum bid of $5 across all the new regions. If we’d duplicated it, you’d go from a minimum of $5 to a minimum of $20! That’s not good.
So, we figured rather than doing that — and having people unhappy that we priced them out of a market — we’d err on the side of caution and have the new regions have no minimum bids. It does mean that if you want to change it it’s not already done for you though, as you’re seeing. I’m sorry it’s a bit of a chore!
(The other option we considered was to divide up existing minimum bids across regions, but that raises tons more of issues that would probably upset more people than they made happy.
)