• by Mark Walsh  @markfwal, November 8, 2011

Aiming to better monetize its vast inventory, Yahoo Tuesday announced a pair of new or upgraded ad targeting services designed to deliver more relevant messages and higher interaction rates. The new services, focused on location and purchase-based targeting, come on the heels of Yahoo's  $270 million acquisition of behavioral targeting firm interclick last week. But the Web portal said the new initiative was in the works prior to the deal.

The location-focused service rolled out today, called Proximity Match, allows advertisers to target consumers through Yahoo according to the distance between their home address and a retail or business location. The goal is to help marketers improve campaign results by localizing target audiences, driving in-store traffic and boosting the ability to track cross-channel sales.

Yahoo's upgraded Consumer Direct targeting tool has added features allowing marketers to target specific consumer segments at scale as well as measure the offline impact of online campaigns. It combines in-store purchase data for a range of CPG categories from Nielsen Catalina Solutions (NCS) with Yahoo's online user data to power audience targeting across its network.

With Facebook surpassing Yahoo as the largest display advertising property online, Yahoo is pushing to squeeze more revenue out of its own ad efforts. In the third quarter, Yahoo’s display ad growth slowed for the second straight quarter, to roughly flat with a year ago. Interim CEO Tim Morse conceded in the earning conference call that the company needs to do a better job of optimizing its non-guaranteed ad inventory.

To that end, Yahoo snapped up interclick, whose open segment manager platform analyzes real-time user data for targeted advertising and helps improve yield from remnant inventory. In the same vein, Yahoo last week also announced a new personalized retargeting product to convert prospects into customers at a higher rate than standard retargeting.

It also rebranded its ad network as the “Yahoo Network Plus” ad network,” combining Yahoo sites with some of the top publishers on the Web and promising marketers access to 87% of Internet visitors. None of the new or upgraded targeting options, however, are tied to the interclick acquisition.

Yahoo said Proximity Match, and its existing Audience Match tool are available across the desktop and mobile Web, and the company is developing a mobile Web offering for Consumer Direct. Audience Match targets uses offline data from partners such as Experian, Acxiom and IXI to target advertising.

The Web portal continues to focus on improving ad targeting, even as it searches for a new CEO and seeks potential buyers for parts or all of the company as part of the strategic reorganization the board announced following the firing of former CEO Carol Bartz in September.