Google's behavioral targeting has become a popular topic these days, and Yahoo has just recently added ?Demographic Bidding?. But before we get familiar with the new, let's review the old. I've put together a table of basic targeting options offered by the three major search engines (Google, Yahoo, and MSN).

All the information is gathered from each search engine's help page.

1.Location Targeting - Allows advertisers to target a specific geographical area, or a combination of areas. Their ads would only show up at the locations they target.

Google allows the advertiser to select any combination of locations to target with their campaigns, including countries, territories, regions, cities and custom areas.

Yahoo allows the advertisers to geographically targeting their campaigns by:

* Entire Market

* Country, State/Province, Designated Market Area (DMA), or City

* ZIP/Postal Code

In MSN, advertisers can target their campaigns to potential customers in specific countries/regions, states/provinces, metro areas, or cities within their market. Microsoft adCenter does not offer targeting by postal code at this time.

2. Language Targeting - Allows advertisers to target their campaigns to a specific or a combination of language group, for example: English, Japanese.

Google's AdWords system looks at a user's Google interface language setting to see if it matches one of the languages that the advertiser's campaign is targeting.

Yahoo do not have Language Targeting option

In MSN by selecting a language and market, you are selecting the language you will write your ads in and the market that your ads will be distributed through.

3. Demographic Targeting - Allows advertisers to target their campaigns to specific age groups, gender, and etc.

Available only on Google content network. Google will analyze the demographical preferences advertisers selected and create a list of available Google Network sites that are popular with that audience.

Currently only available for Yahoo! sites. Demographic bidding adds a premium specified by advertisers to bids that are searched by the preferred demographics, so their ads show up at higher than usual positions.

You can target customers by age and gender so that your ads are displayed more frequently to people who will be interested in them. The data used for the demographic targeting option comes from information reported by MSN customers.

4. Ad Scheduling - Allows advertiser to schedule their ads to show up at different times of the day.

In Google ad scheduling can be enabled for any AdWords Standard Edition campaign. Advertisers may also choose the advanced mode, which allows them to raise or lower their bids for a campaign at certain times of the day.

In Yahoo ads can be set to run all day, to run only on specific times of the day, or to not run at all on specific days. These scheduling preferences can also be mixed so ads run on different schedule for different days.

In MSN Ads can be set to run on specific days of the week and specific times of the day.