We thought we’d post a few tips and tricks for working with the new geotargeting features. There’s some great ideas here for both advertisers and publishers alike! We’ll start with advertisers this time:

Finding good deals for traffic!

You can use the publisher search to find the traffic you want (by region or overall) that’s currently bidding below what you’d like to pay. Whatever you consider a good deal, you can search for whole ad boxes or individual regions that meet that criteria.

Imagine you’re looking specifically for good deals at the regional level. You can quickly enter a few parameters into the search and return only the regions that match. Let’s say that you’re willing to pay up to $0.02/day for a space that will get 500 page views or more on average.

• Check off the categories that go well with what you’re advertising.
• In the “Traffic regions” section, select “Graph each region separately” and “Return only the regions that meet my criteria”.
• In the “Traffic” section, enter 500 in the first field for historical page views (the top section of the box).
• In the “Bidding” section, entered 0.01 in the second box for current bid AND the second box for minimum bid. This ensures that any site matching the criteria is currently bidding at $0.01/day or less, and that this isn’t because the minimum bid isn’t at or above the maximum you want to pay.

The search results list all of the sites with at least one region that meets the criteria, with only the matching regions listed. You can either narrow the search criteria more to get you a more exclusive list, or set up a campaign to operate only on regions that meet this criteria. (You can also place bids by hand on sites you choose from the results.)

Of course, everyone’s idea of a lot of traffic or a good deal will be different. Play around with the numbers and find something that works for you!

Finding your niche audience in a grouped region!

Does “Elsewhere” seem like geographical soup to you? The reality is that most sites are attracting the bulk of their audience from just one or two countries. If you are advertising a product with local shipping, or a face-to-face service, there’s an easy way to find readers near you.

From the “Traffic regions” section of the publisher search, select just the region you are reaching. For example, if you are mainly interested in reaching visitors from South Africa, make sure “Elsewhere” is the only region checked off.

In the “Referrers and traffic origin” section of the search, enter a minimum percentage of traffic you want coming from your target country, and select the name of the country from the dropdown. For our example, you might want to try 30% from South Africa.

The search results will now list only the Elsewhere region for sites where at 30% or more of the visits in that region come from South Africa. You can do the same thing for any country you are interested in!

Try running campaigns: they’re a powerful way to advertise, and can do everything your bids placed by hand do, and more!

If you are placing a lot of bids by hand, you may be interested in using campaigns to manage your bids. You can base a campaign off a publisher search, so new sites meeting your criteria are automatically included, or you can specify which ad boxes are included or excluded. You can enter your maximum bid (per ad box or per region — it’s up to you!), along with daily and overall spending targets for the campaign to use as a budget guide.

Campaigns are great, because they are checked frequently throughout the day and night to make sure the bids are on track for meeting your criteria. So you can just check in once a day and then focus your time on running your business or other important tasks.

Some people choose to place bids by hand because they like to have different spending caps for different sites. If this describes you — and you won’t want to manage the spending at the regional level — you can setup a campaign for just the ad box you want to target, and enter a maximum bid to cover the entire ad box. It will place the bids across the regions for you, but still report the overall statistics. If you change your mind about what you want to pay for the space, you can simply update the maximum bid for the entire ad box, and the regions will be updated accordingly!

Attracting advertisers on your small site!

If the “Your ad here, right now: $/day” caption is disabled for your ad box, you may be missing out on potential advertisers. Many people just assume that ad banners are for large corporations who are placing ads on hundreds or thousands of sites at once. They don’t understand that it can be affordable or targeted.

By turning the “Your ad here” caption on, you’re sending the message to your readers that they can place an ad with you quite easily. Having the price displayed can also reassure them that it doesn’t require hundreds of dollars to get their product or service out there.

Lower traffic sites sometimes find it challenging to attract bids, so the caption can be a fantastic way to reach out. Your readers have an interest in your site, understand the readership and their interests, and are more likely to want a longer-term relationship than strangers who find your site through a publisher search. To re-enable the captions under your ad boxes, go to “My ad boxes” -> “Edit” -> “Your ad here text”.

Attracting ads for empty regional spaces!

Geotargeting is new, and everyone is taking a little time to get familiar with the changes. Many of the regions that have no bids right now should start to see more bids in the next week or so.

In the meantime, there’s a great solution that can attract advertisements that relate well to your niche: custom default ad images!

You can replace the default “your ad here” with something of your own, and it can be different for each region. This can be especially useful for the Europe and Elsewhere regions.

Is your Elsewhere traffic coming mainly from Australia? Draw visitors’ attention to this by having your default ad say “Advertise to Australians!” If your European traffic is dominated by Romanians, let them know they can “Reach Romanians here!”

By setting these custom default images, visitors who might have otherwise assumed this was a generic space sitting empty can see that they are going to be able to reach customers more local than they imagined. This has a benefit of bringing in advertisers who are far more relevant to your readers than what they would have seen without geotargeting.

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!