Has anyone else started seeing Adwords with city names under them? I just saw one like this “Got a favorite burrito? Vote for your favorite burrito in the San Francisco Bay Area! www.burritobot.com San Francisco-Oakland-San Jose, CA” when I searched for burrito.
I haven’t seen this, but have you customized your google portal (google.com/ig)? Did you tell them yout zip code for weather? They could be using that.
Being in North Dakota, I don’t think anyone around here is advertising burritos on the internet. Actually, I’d be surprised if anyone advertises anything with Adwords out here.
I did tell them my zip code for the portal, though I don’t think it was on this computer.
I just did several searches for various types of retail items. And several of them turned up something similar. But all of them had the same “San Francisco-Oakland-San Jose, CA” string. And I’m much closer to the east coast.
I think they can just use your IP address to find out where you are located (or least the proximity). When I look at the stats software for my site, it shows me the city, state, and country of each visitor. This is probably not always exact, but I think it makes sense for advertisers to at least try and use that information.
Matt: [….I did tell them my zip code for the portal, though I don’t think it was on this computer.]
The ‘Google-Burrito Spies’ will stop at nothing!!!
They’re probably in your trash…weeding the burrito scraps and putting 2 and 3 together!
And next week….MSN Search (lightning fast to react to net competition) will be telling you where you can get your Tacos from in your neighbourhood….hmmmm.
They probably just read my food blog and know what a burrito freak I am.
You have a ‘food’ blog?
By the way Matt, this image (http://photomatt.net/a/12-16-2003/IMGP0560.thumb.jpg) – where was that taken? It looks like something bad happened – but I really can’t tell what exactly.
I am confused by all the Matt’s.
Chipotle rules.
Tell me about it. I searched “chicken wings” and I get a bunch of ads referencing Buffalo! I also heard about this guy in France who did a search on “fries” . . .
There are too much Matt in here, it’s confusing 😉
Okay since it’s my website I vote for the other Matt to change how he signs his comments.
Oh and by the way (although totally off-topic) Matt, when I increase the font size of Firefox when viewing comments on your blog, this happens.
Okay, there is you, Matt – the site owner….there is Matt of action80.com…and there is me (also Matt!)
I’ll sign on your site as Matt Robin…as it’s my name. Does that help?
No extra votes needed Matt! *nods to site-owner*
Remi Prevost: [….Oh and by the way (although totally off-topic) Matt, when I increase the font size of Firefox when viewing comments on your blog, this happens.]
Remi – I got the same fault moments ago!
It looks very wrong….I haven’t bothered to investigate code – but it looks like the ‘fixed’ nature of the layout forces the increased font-sizing (mine triggered by accident from a different site!) to alter the comment boxes and their positioning on the page!
I haven’t tried this in a different browser yet to confirm if it’s just a firefox bug or not.
Have you come across this yet Matt?
I get ads for bigpond downloads hehe. I’m certain they use IPs, but since I’m in .au they just seem to class us as one BIG ip and I get stuff that’s totally not on my coast :p
More interesting perhaps, why were you searching for “burrito”?
It was a spell-check.
Why not use Google suggest for that? You never even have to submit the query.
AAAARGGGHHH???? matt here, matt there, matt everywhere O.o
Saludos 😀
One of the members of the “someone who is not named Matt” group would like to completely ignore most of the thread of this post and mention that La Costena in Mountain View has the absolute best burritos. I used to work out there(before I had to move back to the “other” coast) and can fondly remember pointing at ingredients while the man/woman/teenager behind the counter would lovingly assemble my burrito to the specifications outlined by my drooling facial gestures and desperate arm movements.
Serves me right for choosing “French” as my foreign language in school. I can’t even speak that very well anymore.
Yes i’ve seen ‘New South Wales’ (an australian state) come up under some ads while searching google
Google Adwords allows you to select the city/state/country of the person you are targeting (more accurately, it allows you to target specific markets). It is based off your IP address using a table of ip addresses to cities. The most well-known maintainer of these databases is Maxmind who will go as far as to give you an approximate lat/long for individual users. I am an Earthlink Resold-Roadrunner Cable Subscriber, so I am on the Earthlink IP Block and all of my traffic goes through Kansas City. I am identified as being in Kansas city by some software or (as with MaxMind’s table) I am correctly identified as being in Milwaukee.
Maxmind has a free Apache mod that will give you the country code for IP addresses (given to your scripts as a global server var) or you can download it and load it into MySQL yourself (quite a bit slower than the binary/apache mod).
The attack of the matts! ^_^,
anyway, that word just got me hungry.. >_
I just get the ebay ads ‘Great deals on burrito! Shop and save!’ because duh. Ebay is sooo the first place I would look when I’m jonesing for some mexican goodness.
The comment before this one posted by Nick Catalano answered this perfectly. We use Google Adwords here at work, and do exactly what burritobot.com is doing (no, not selling burritos :)). Our sister-company establishes links between home buyers and realtors – and depending on what region (down to the county/city even) we are focusing on, we are able to target our ads to be displayed within that specific area, though it is based on the user’s IP address, so it is not always reliable – but it does work to a large extent.
Check out this page on Google Adwords’ website for more information on “Regional and Local Targeting”: https://adwords.google.com/select/targeting.html