This morning, the Deets' Ed Kohler turned a withering glance on City Pages, noting it serves up strictly local ads to what's surely a national audience. Kohler, a very web-savvy guy, wonders why that is. If your topics lure in non-Minnesotans — and CP's clearly do — why not geotarget your ads?

Geotargeting allows a site to serve up ads based on various web measures of a user's location. City Pages editor Kevin Hoffman says more than 50 percent of his traffic is local, but doesn't specify how much. Kohler's advice:

Local advertisers need to start asking questions about the geotargeting of their ads. Are their ads being displayed solely to people in their community? Or, are local advertisers paying for ad impressions served to people well beyond their geographic target markets?

As evidence of "traffic quality" issues, Kohler casts aspersions at a previous target, CP's Blotter. He writes that it is:

...rarely linked up in the local blogosphere and has less than 100 subscribers according to Google Reader, [yet] somehow managed to grow from 35,000 to 250,000 page views per month in just two months. If the site isn’t getting linked up locally, and hasn’t build a large subscriber base, where’s the traffic coming from?

He promises specifics next Thursday, which should be entertaining.

Two notes:

1. MinnPost also doesn't geotarget, though we're planning to do so once a couple of small technical problems are solved. About 80 percent of our pageviews come from Minnesota, by the way.

2. Braublog also has fewer than 100 Google Reader subscribers, while monthly pageviews are above 150,000 after three months in business. As much as I love and use Google Reader (and encourage you to subscribe thusly), it's only an imprecise predictor of local interest. I'm sure Ed will have more details next week.