Get Scientific when Geo-targeting Adwords Campaigns
Nov 6, 2007 Google Adwords
Numerous analytics tools are at the search marketer’s disposal to research and analyze tactics for pay-per-click campaigns. Targeting your ads for regions and cities is quite possibly amongst the most important settings in Adwords Campaign settings. How many search marketers will actually get scientific about what their analytics suites are telling them about their campaigns? Very few in the markets my clients compete within, so what’s the problem?
Here are my Top 10 Geo-targeting Tips for Google Adwords:
- Instead of calculating and analyzing ROI numbers at the campaign level, try to break down your results by State or Province, or better yet, major metropolitan areas. Are your competitors based out of cities and regions you’re targeting? What do the ROI numbers look like for those areas?
- Invest some time in testing keywords using a proxy service to see what (if any) local competition you’re up against. Pay special attention to display ads and landing pages. You might be surprised.
- Compare ROI from geographical profiles of your organic site traffic with your sponsored search traffic. Sometimes the person searching for information in Google isn’t the purchaser. If they’re using two computers (and they probably are), your ROI numbers might have to be adjusted.
- Compare visitor frequency information from various geographical areas. Does a lot of traffic come from one particular city, domain, or IP address? If you don’t have conversion information from this source, you may have found a competitor snooping for information. Use the IP exclusion tool to minimize their effect on your bottom line.
- Don’t leave your campaigns open to the entire world. There are instances where display ads in English evoke a response (and clicks) or generate interest from poorly targeted prospects. If you are going to target foreign language placements with an English-only website, be sure to keep your display text in English.
- Analyze bounce rates and site path information from your analytics suite. There are occasions when visitors from different regions may be turned off, or worse yet, offended by little things on your landing pages.
- Determine the most profitable ad positioning for individual regions. If competition is not as fierce in certain cities, you might be ranking front and center and getting clicks, but your competitors top right might be getting the conversions.
- Compare online conversion with offline conversion information. Residents of some cities may prefer to call your business and convert over the phone, rather than convert online. If so, you may need to adjust your ROI numbers accordingly.
- Be aware of unique keywords and combinations that may differ from one city to another. In Toronto, people normally order a Coke or Pepsi, whereas across the border in Chicago they may be more likely to order a Cola, or Soda. You say tomato…
- Don’t be afraid to ask for help! Google wants you to spend money, and will help you choose keywords and regions where they think your ads might generate clicks for them, and ROI for you. If you’ve been in the game a while though, you probably know better than them.
As always, the most important thing you can do as a search marketer is optimize, test, wait, rinse and repeat.
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