Location, etc. etc.

The old real estate joke - that never seems to get funny - says that only three things matter when buying or selling property: location, location, location.

And sad as that warhorse of a joke is, there's truth to be found in it. The same thing happens with advertising. You want to make sure that the ads you place are in the same location as the people who are most likely to respond to them. Finding that meeting point of your ads and your potential customers is one of the biggest challenges you'll face.

Set aside the topic of what the ad says because we've got plenty of time to get into that later. The thing to think about today is where your perfectly crafted ad should go to generate the best results.

Look at your own life. Think about where you go and what you do and how you find out about new products. Do you see a billboard about a radio station as you're driving around town? Notice all those debt consolidation commercials on television during the day? The full page ads in the Wall Street Journal just before you get to the stock pages? Each ad mentioned was placed there specifically because the location met the audience.

But even then, it's a bit of smoke and mirrors. Who's to say that the person watching Jerry Springer in the afternoon isn't a wealthy aficionado of daytime television, or that the radio station on the billboard can't be heard by people driving by that billboard or that the only people who opened that page of the WSJ were making paper hats. What's needed is a way to test the efficiency of these ads. To give them a way to tell the audience about the product in the ad, but also a way of telling the advertiser who saw the ad and was moved to make contact from it.

And again, that's where we come in.

AdSymetrix is helping to bridge that gap, and in doing so helping you - the advertiser - make better decisions about where the location of your ad placements.