Google localises ads even further

15 April 2004 14:10 GMT / By Stuart Miles

Google it seems is on the rampage to make sure that its ad service becomes not only the best on the web, but also the most relevant. Plans are afoot from today to give websites more options for tailoring their advertisements with the search engine even further.

Under a new scheme launching today, advertisers will be able to target geographically - i.e national companies will be able to target nationally while local companies just in the surrounding areas of their shop or business.

Up until now Google has only allowed would be advertisers to determine on a national level. The new scheme will be available to advertisers targeting the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Spain and the Netherlands have the most options allowing them to specify cities or metropolitan areas they wish to target.

Elsewhere, merchants can enter their address and a radius, in miles or kilometers, around which to target. So an Indian merchant can type in a New Delhi address and have the ad appear on computers located within 50 kilometers of the business.

Web sites can also target ads based on their latitude and longitude. Google generally knows where a user is, based on the Internet Protocol, or IP, address associated with the computer being used.

Although technology for IP targeting has improved greatly in recent years, there are still cases where a location can be determined no better than a country or state. In those cases, Google would not display any localized ads to ensure greatest accuracy for the ads that do appear.

Google is currently in a law suit in California over proposed infringement of users details to serve better ads. This system however doesn't give any personal information, only the location of your PC.

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