Jeepers Shaggy, it’s about time!
You know when MSN AdCenter has a tool that you don’t you’re getting lapped. Even if it’s not the most robust or granular tool, it’s still rather helpful to be able to choose at what time during the day your ads show or being able to incrementally adjust your bids based on the audience. This may be less applicable to some industries (think groceries, real estate and cars) but very applicable for others (perhaps weddings, jewelry and fantasy football).
So today I was pleased to see that finally after all the emails, announcements and whatevers that tool is live in my account and there for me to play with. Without further adieu, let’s take it for a test drive.
Open up the campaign you wish to abuse with your new found powers of targeting and click on “campaign settings.”
All down the right hand side are the new options in Demographic, Geo Target and Ad Scheduling. Please note that in a most excellent move that you can do these settings on the ad group level as well.
First up: Ad Scheduling (scroll down) Click edit and check out the schedule.

Here’s what’s great about it:

• You can set the time zone to the audience time zone or the account setting time zone.
• Easy edit friendly dashboard to change the hours in which the ads show. All the hours show in one long drop down, not much scrolling needed.
• You can incrementally increase by percentage and dollar amount! Being able to increase my bid by 0.05 or 0.30 without doing the math of percentages? Sold!

Here’s my wish list:

• Bulk edits by weekend, weekday. Editing each and every single day is tiresome.
• Edits by hour. Since the ability to bid by dollar amount is there, I would love to see the ability to increase my bids by .50 during the hours of 11am and 3pm, for example.
• When I click on any of the boxes within the chosen day, it would be nice if the hour that I clicked on was automatically listed as the “start” time instead of midnight being the default.

Ok now that you’ve gone through and set the hours and bids that you want, click “apply” and magically your chosen hours will populate that previously empty box on the campaign settings page.
Let’s move on to Demographic Bidding.
Click “edit” and check the “turn on demographic reporting for this campaign” to start the adjustments. Like the Google Content Network, you can block the 17 yr olds and under, but not any of the other age ranges. Simply click the “Adjust Bid” button next to the gender or age group you wish to increase bids for and like the ad scheduling tool, you can choose to increase by percentage or dollar amount.


The high points:

• Being able to increase by dollar or percentage amount.
• Finally being able to target by age and gender!
• It looks like once the tool is enabled you’ll be able to see data on Impressions and Clicks for the age ranges you’re targeting. Mine aren’t old enough to have any data yet, but this is very cool.

My wish list:

• Be able to exclude age groups or genders beside the 17 and under category
• Being able to decrease the bid based on an age group or gender.

Enhanced Geographic Targeting isn’t something I’ve played with yet. I just don’t have the need right now for it, but according to Yahoo it sounds useful:
“Available for both Sponsored Search and Content Match, you can mix and match geo-targeting settings at different levels within the same campaign or ad group. New dynamic mapping features help you select individual ZIP codes and ZIP codes surrounding them.”
Overall, this is great. Finally a better mousetrap in terms of Yahoo Search Marketing. My only complaint overall is that on your main dashboard the column that is called “Targeting” doesn’t show up. I got it to show up once, on a fluke I guess, and luckily I got a screenshot.

The elusive Targeting column lets you know which campaigns have geographic, ad scheduling and demographic targeting enabled.
But it is only the first day after all. What do you think of the new Yahoo features?