Basic Features

A little off-topic from previous posts, but...

I'm currently doing some online media buying for a couple of ad campaigns. Online advertising has been around for, what, over a decade now right? And one of the great benefits of this medium is the ability to precision target.

Why, then, are there still major Web sites that don't offer basic capabilities like geographic targeting of ads? Just as incredibly, some sites that do provide geo-targeting actually charge extra for the privilege.

Any sites that already use an ad server can have geo-targeting capabilities for virtually no additional cost. Maybe a bit of extra time for the technical and traffic people to set up, and maybe a slightly higher ad serving cost, but these shouldn't be sufficient impediments.

Even worse, it's not just a case of "here's something extra we could do for a few of our customers."

By offering geo-targeting, a publisher is actually increasing the value of all their ad impressions -- even those used by advertisers who don't specifically look for this feature.

On a basic level, there's the benefit to those who want this feature: If I'm going after a very specific audience, I'm wasting every impression that's seen by someone other than my target. So, the more targeting capabilities available to me, the better-performing my campaign will be. As a result, the happier with the publisher and will be more likely use them again. I don't mind paying a higher (but reasonable) price because I'm satisfied with the response rate.

Beyond this, there's the benefit to many of the other advertisers: Impressions that a local or regional advertiser takes from the "pool" of avails are ones that national advertisers may not even want anyway. For example, let's say a US-based site has 1,000,000 impressions each month, and that 50,000 of these are from users in Australia. If an Australia-based company buys those 50,000 impressions specifically, the remaining advertisers who are targeting American users know that they aren't wasting their money reaching people who can't or won't buy their products.

Regardless of the details, though, the simple point is that a feature that adds value to someone could be offered with very very little effort to the provider, and yet isn't.

I suspect it's just laziness. One of those things that "we'll get around to eventually." If the bulk of customers are equally lazy (or ignorant of the possibilities) and buying most of what the supplier has available, it's understandable that the supplier feels no pressing need to make even a minimal effort for the time-being.

But:
a.) Money is money and new business is new business. Why turn away a potentially good customer who would like to buy from you?

b.) The marketplace (any marketplace) is competitive. If you don't offer a feature, somebody else does (or soon will). Lose a customer to them now, and you very likely won't easily get that customer later.

c.) Customers won't stay lazy or ignorant forever (in part, because of the competitors from #2).

Edited to add:
Okay, so I got a bit of an explanation about this from one site. They say that it's not worth doing geo-targeting (at least for the markets I'm buying) because they don't have enough impressions in a particular geographic location. Their excuse is that they have a minimum spend amount in order to ensure that a particular campaign gets enough impressions to be effective. In order to reach this minimum spend, I'd have to buy about 2/3 of a market's impressions each month. Okay, fair enough. But... if this is really the case, why not drop the minimum spend for campaigns that use geo-targeting to this degree? If I'm buying 2/3, or even 1/3, or even 1/8 of ALL the targeted impressions on a site, I'm probably getting some pretty strong reach and frequency numbers for my target audience. There wouldn't be much clutter to compete with. I'd much rather monopolize a small target than waste a bunch of impressions on a completely irrelevant broader audience.

I'll keep waiting for a good explanation.