A great new Project Wonderful feature: geotargeting!
January 6, 2010 geotargeting, new features 16 CommentsWe’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!)













