Dave Naffziger's Blog

Hats off to the aimClear team for helping identify and clarify Yahoo’s geotargeting issues (via Online Marketing Blog).

Yahoo messed up so badly, it seems that they’ve disabled the geotargeting features for now. BTW, I can’t tell you how happy I am that these issues aren’t related to the core technology. At Quova, we constantly heard things like ‘why are you showing my IP to be in Minneapolis - I’m in St. Paul’.

Geotargeting is often mistaken for something that is easy to do and easy to implement. Neither are true. However, both are easy to do a poor job at. Effective use of geotargeting technology requires someone to sit down and carefully map out the full user experience. This involves these frequently overlooked scenarios:

• No geotargeting information (or information that is known to be unreliable)
• The user is trying to hide himself (yes, these can be detected)
• Incorrect geotargeting information - you obviously want to give the user a way of telling you that you’re wrong.
• Geotargeting information available at a different resolution. The user is reliably determined to be in the Bay Area, but the technology cannot reliably determine whether they are in Oakland or San Jose.