Geo-Targeting Already Available in RSS Advertising

ClickZ reports that Google is actually doing geo-targeting for the ads they place in publishers' RSS feeds, which comes as a surprise to most marketers.

Their system simply takes campaign settings, set by the client, and then applies to "traditional" Google ad options, as well as RSS feeds.

"Advertisers cannot specifically target RSS ads locally, but regionally or locally targeted ads within Google's content network could potentially be shown in feeds as well as on Web sites. Both the location of the user and content of the feed are contributing factors to targeting the ads, with the content of the feed being the primary factor in targeting, Ghosemajumder said."

Any kind of targeting is of course not anything new for RSS ads, as most traditional online advertising approaches can quite easily be applied to RSS advertising.

Well, at least we're finally getting to the point where marketers might start accepting RSS as a trackable and targetable marketing platform.

Returning to the ClickZ article, they do say that right now RSS ad CTRs are "extremely" low for marketers, demonstrating that best practices still need to be established.