Setting Up Geotargeting, or Location Targeting, in Google Adwords

A quick way to generate traffic for most businesses is through paid ads on Google, Bing, Facebook, Twitter, or other social media platforms. Doing this will allow your team to see a sudden spike in analytics and gain more useful insights into how users interact with your website, engage with your content, or use search terms to find your website.

In this post we will be discussing PPC, or Google AdWords. More specifically, we will be looking at how to set up Geotargeting. This is an important element of AdWords to consider when setting up your next campaign because it will help exclude users who are outside of your target location that you don’t want to bid on. This helps saves your business money and increase the value of the analytics collected from use behavior.

Setting up Geotargeting In Google Adwords

When setting up your Google AdWords account and campaigns, you need to ask yourself whether everyone needs to see the ads. The answer for most businesses is no. Unless you are a global company that needs to generate new business, you most likely don’t need to target the world. Your ads only need to be seen by your target audience.

Geotargeting allows you to target your ads so they only appear to customers in a certain location or set of locations that you specify to meet your business goals. This saves money from being spent on clicks outside your geographical reach.

To identify your target audience, make use of internal data collected from existing customers or research keywords using Google Analytics or Google Trends to identify the regions that commonly search for that information.

Steps for setting up Geotargeting

You probably skimmed over the previous two paragraphs, but there is valuable information there. Skim it once more to make sure you’ve retained that information. Then proceed with the following steps:

• After selecting the campaign you wish to edit:
  • Scroll to the “Locations & Languages” section and click edit.
  • Click on the search tab and start typing the desired location; then select it when it appears on the drop-down menu.
    • Search by country, region (state or province), city, postal code, or airports.
      • Each location will show you the reach of that area, which is the number of users that could potentially see your ad in that location.
      • You also have the option to exclude certain areas. This is particularly useful if you have two locations near each other but only want to reach users to the west or east of the zip code those locations are in.
      • By radius allows you to select a certain distance around the location of your choice. This is also referred to as proximity targeting. This is useful for service companies who only service a certain area or have different prices for areas outside of their main target location.
      • If you have too many locations to add, you can simply paste a long list of locations, up to 1,000 at a time, to add in bulk. However, you have to select a specific country code for this specific location.

Tips and Best Practices

Yay! It’s time for the diamond in the rough. We all want to know the best practices for every trade to be sure we operate within the respected realm of reasoning, but our first piece of advice is, don’t live by best practices and follow what works for your team and business. Now that we understand that, here are a few other general rules of thumb to follow:

• Target the locations where your customers are.
• Exclude certain locations that you don’t want to target. This is just as important as targeting those you do want.
• Gain regional insights about your customers by using tools outside of AdWords like Google Analytics or Google Trends.
• Add regional terms to your keyword list and ad copy, even if you are targeting that region.
• Enable location extensions with your local ads so that customers will be able to find and contact you more easily.
• Change the default setting from “People in, searching for, or viewing pages about my targeted location,” which is recommended by Google, to “People in my target location.”
  • To change this, go to Campaign Settings > Location Options (Advanced) > Edit > Select “People in my targeted location”

Following these steps and best practices should allow your team to run a fairly successful AdWords campaign. However, there might other tips or tricks that your team has learned along the way. What other tactics have your team used in the past to reach your target audience and generate more business?