Feedburner geotagging

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Yesterday, Feedburner dropped a russian language advertisement into my feed. Not knowing what it was, I hesitated at first to approve it.  However I did.  Today, email arrived with an explanation.

Howdy! Earlier today, you received notification of a new ad at FeedBurner. Unlike other ads, this ad was different. As in can’t-read-it different.

Yep. It was in Russian.

No doubt some of you saw that and said, “Wow. They must love me in Leningrad” and approved the ad without further thought. But most of you, if you’re like us, said, “Umm… Russian?”

Here’s the thing: we quietly rolled out a new capability about 6 weeks ago that allows advertisers to geo-target their ads. Once the advertiser selects the regions where they want to advertise, only people in those regions will see the ads. Pretty cool.

So… we have a new advertiser, for whom we’re doing a bit of a test. They wanted to advertise to tech-savvy individuals in Russia, and hard as this is to believe, we don’t have a ton of tech publishers in Russia. (Yes, we’re working on it.) So we’re trying out the geo-targeting campaign by running their ad across our technology network, but geo-targeted so that only people in Russia will see it.

The only glitch here is that when we trafficked the ad, the Monetize dashboard doesn’t show you that an ad is geo-targeted. So seeing a Russian-language ad can be a bit jarring. So consider this both an announcement of a new feature as well as a head’s up that in the very near future, the approval wizard will have a designation that lets you know when an ad is geo-targeted.

Cool!  I’d love to have a translation of the ad before I approve it, though.

 

Alec Saunders is the Vice President of Developer Relations for BlackBerry maker Research in Motion. This is his personal blog, with his personal viewpoints. Prior to this Alec was the CEO and co-founder of Calliflower — the easiest way to hold a meeting, online, on a conference call, or on the go. A double-decade veteran of product management and marketing, he spent nine years at Microsoft where he helped launch Windows 95, the first two versions of Internet Explorer, the Universal Plug and Play initiative, the push into home markets, opt-in email marketing and what might well go down in history as the very first direct email list ever.