Yahoo Geotargeting...Does it exist?

[ErinD]

Our client sells a large product, and has the selling rights for various states in the midwest. They are not authorized to sell in other parts of the nation. Their PPC titles indicate which states they can sell their product in.

They would like to set up geotargeting (regionally targeted campaigns) to capture the leads from the states they are authorized to sell in, but none of the other states. Yet, they are concerned with losing leads that come from AOL users, so they have want to include geotargeting for West Virginia -- apparantly since AOL is based here, it appears that the IPs coming from AOL are all coming from West Virginia. (Please correct me if I am wrong).

They've called their rep at Yahoo! and were passed around to three different individuals who all told them a different story...one said geotargeting is not available; another said, "what, yes it is available"; and the last one said, "no, they can't verify regionally targeted campaigns". Needless to say, they are a bit confused.

Since we work with this client for the SEO, they asked us to take a look at it. However, I'm not finding many answers. Does anyone know if geotargeting for Yahoo! exists? If so, is there a URL where this information is posted, or do they need to contact Yahoo! again to further discuss. It didn't seem very useful the last time they contacted their customer service department.

Does anyone have any other suggestions for how they've handled this sort of situation with Yahoo!? They did discuss local with their Yahoo! rep, but their understanding is that they would have to enter each major city, and resubmit all of their keywords (250+) for each local area...but if this is the only way, it will be done.

Thank you.

[Sarah]

My rep told me it was available. When I went to set up the campaign, however, he told me that I have to do it through a Local Match rep. Apparently you need to set up a Local Match account with business info (address, website, phone #) which is accessible through local.yahoo.com. So if you're bidding on "Pizza" in NY, pizza would show up on the local site, and also under the "Find Pizza Near You" link on normal search listings.

I find it hard to believe that they don't have normal geotargeting. That's a huge disadvantage.

I'm eager to see if anyone else has different insight. I'd like to know if my rep was wrong and I'm missing out!

[PortofDreams]

To my knowledge Sarah is correct. However, I have also heard some rumors from our Yahoo Search Mktg rep that we can expect to see some major changes (finally) in the interface and setup over the next 6 months or so.