Geo Targeting

In the second Encore presentation for The Black Ink Project, Jeremy talks about geo targeting and I was hoping to hear from Jeremy and others about their opinions on how to do this and which method works best.

I’ve been using geo targeting for about 2 years with a couple of different methods.

Method 1:
Create a regular campaign, and the keywords in the campaign will target different geographical locations, but the campaign will be set up as a non-geo targeted campaign. You would have keywords like:

Florida Auto Loans
Texas Auto Loans
Utah Auto Loans

Then, using the Keyword Insertion Tool, and the Alt Text feature in Yahoo, you can place the exact keyword the way you want it into your ad.

This method seems to work best if you mainly going to just target state names.

Method 2:
Create a campaign in Yahoo that only targets a certain geographic location. Using this method, you would then have the state name, as well as any city, town, county and district names.

This method is almost necessary if you’re going to use more than just the state name, because many states have city names that are the same as other states, so to keep Yahoo from seeing it as a duplicate keyword, you would need to set this method.

When I was coming up with my list of every city in every state in the US, I found several city names that existed in 10+ states.

Using this method, you could have keywords like:

Florida Auto Loans
Tampa Auto Loans
St. Pete Auto Loans
Brandon Auto Loans
Miami Auto Loans

Has anyone experimented with these 2 methods?

James