Be VERY Careful when using Location Targeting

In an earlier blog post I talked about using location targeting to make sure your ads appear to audiences in places that could and would want to buy your products.

Just to reinforce the point I was making I called the article “Selling Ice Cream to the Eskimos“.

To recap, location targeting allows you to set geographical limitations for your campaigns. It’s one of the campaign settings.

There are two ways this setting works. Your ads will be seen by:

1. Anyone that Google decides is within your targeted locations (they use IP addressing and it’s not always that accurate)
2. Anyone anywhere who uses one of your keywords in combination with a word that defines a geographic place (for example, a town name). Obviously this would only work on keywords using Broad and Phrase match since you can’t have any extra words with Exact match.

Location targeting can be a real asset to local businesses who are trying to target a very specific area. However it still has its drawbacks and you need to take some care.

Here’s an example of what I mean.

Let’s say you have a campaign that has location targeting set to London, UK.

If someone searches using one of your keyphrases and also includes the word London then your Ad could be displayed.

Good you might think. That’s what you would want.

However, what if I told you there are at least four London’s in the world. Two in America, one in Canada and one in the UK. The searcher may actually have been looking for something in London, Ohio. In this case an Ad for services in London, UK is unlikely to win any business for the advertiser!

Consider in fact the local business person who’s trying to advertise locally in Washington, UK! Yes my American friends we do have a Washington here in the UK. Where do you think George came from?

So as you can see, some issues to be aware of.

Also, location targeting isn’t that accurate at determining exactly where in the world the searcher is.

Google decides their location based on the IP address that the searcher is using (everyone gets an IP address assigned to them when they surf online).

Without getting too technical, the problem with this approach is that the IP address your are given may be not accurately reflect where you really are. If you live near a large city, it’s likely that your IP address will be associated with routers in that city and therefore Google will think you live in that city.

However don’t despair, location does work reasonably well for most people and there is a way that you can stack the odds in your favour. This is certainly worth a test.

You need to set up two campaigns. One using Google’s location targeting specifically set to the area you are chasing (eg: London). The second uses a much broader location (eg: England). However in this second campaign you use keywords that include the town names you are specifically interested in.

Whenever I have done this, I have seen much lower impressions for the second campaign but the conversion rates have been significantly better.

Test it. Location targeting is worth trying but you still have to work at it.