As with any form of paid advertisement, finding ways to maximize ROI should always be somewhere near the top of the list of a company’s priorities. Every business has a budget that they need to follow and fortunately, Google has ways to help allocate funds in a way that lets you pick and choose where your money goes. Welcome to geotargeting!
What is Geotargeting?
As the name suggests, geotargeting is something you can do while setting up your ads to make sure they only appear to customers in a targeted location. With this feature, you’re able to literally keep track of where your money is going.
Why Should I Use Geotargeting?
Every business is different. However, when creating a Google Ad campaign, Google will automatically have it set to show your ad to anyone, regardless of their geographic location. Now, it’s likely that your target demographic isn’t every single person, so we’re going to need to narrow this down quite a bit. For example, let’s say you’re a local shop in Los Angeles and most of the customers that you have in your store are from the nearby area. If your ads are showing up for people in North Carolina, it’s money wasted!
Save Some Money
Let’s say you’re the owner of a local shop in a small town. It wouldn’t make any sense to be showing your ads to someone across the country, let alone someone in a completely different country! If they stumbled across your ad and happened to click on it, that’s money that you’re spending on customers with a nearly 0% chance of converting. Even if they might have been the ideal type of customer, if they aren’t in the area that you serve, your ad spend is being wasted! So, take this time to think about what areas you would realistically be serving and we’ll show you how to target those regions later in this article. If you’d like, you could also do a deeper dive to research areas that your competitors are dominating in and exclude those locations as well.
Make Your Ads Personal
When you set up your ads to be for a specific area, you’re able to incorporate copy that would best resonate with the people in your targeted location. Also, since you’re aware of where your ads are being shown, you could personalize them even further! Let’s say there’s a conference or concert being held near or in your target location. If you’re a restaurant owner, you may want to consider offering a promotion or some sort of discount to those who are visiting your area for the event.
How to Set Up Geotargeting
Now that you know how important it is to have personalized and cost-efficient ads, it’s time to set it up!
-
- Navigate to your Google Ads page and select the campaign you want to work on.
- Once you’re on the Ad Groups page, select Settings.
- In the Locations section, you’ll now be able to select different locations to target.
- If you need to, you have the option to type in a location that you want to target as well.
- By clicking on Advanced Search, you’ll be given a few more options that allow you to:
- Add locations to your existing list of targeted locations
- Exclude certain regions from seeing your ads
- We highly recommend creating a list of locations that you want to be excluded.
- See other nearby locations that you might want to target as well
- Under Location Options, Google gives you the option to specify Presence, Search Interest, or both.
- If you are unsure, we typically recommend setting Target and Exclude to Presence although it does vary business to business.
Additional Tips to Boost ROI
In addition to simply setting up location targeting for your advertisements, we have a few helpful tips that you might want to consider implementing as well!
Study Your Data
From your Google Ads page, you should be able to select the locations tab near the left side of your screen. From here, you can see all the relevant data of your campaigns based on the targeted location that you set. Based on the data that you see, you may want to allocate some ad spend towards other campaigns or regions that seem to be performing better.
Implement Negative Keywords
Take a look at some keywords that trigger your ads despite being outside your targeted locations. The Search Terms Report can help you with this! If your ads are being clicked on by people searching for similar businesses as yours but in an area that you don’t service, add these keywords to your negative keywords list! If you need help accessing your Search Terms Report, you should be able to find it in the Campaigns tab. By clicking on Keywords and navigating to Details, you can find a report for all the keywords in your campaign.
Adjust Your Bidding
After you start acquiring some data on how your different campaigns are performing, we recommend you start adjusting how much you’re willing to bid based on the results. For example, if you see that you’ve been getting more conversions in a specific area, you’d find more value in making sure people who are in those areas see your ads. By allocating and prioritizing where to place your ad spend, you’ll find that your cost per acquisition may start to decrease.
Be Picky
Many businesses that we’ve worked with have had the same mentality of wanting to cast a wider net to try to get more sales. As great as this is, they seem to forget that PPC ad spend comes out of their own wallet! We recommend focusing your efforts on the locations where you see the most sales and letting your SEO do the work of finding customers outside of your geotargeted area. Don’t be afraid to exclude locations as well. If there are locations that you really know you don’t want to be seen, Google Ads gives you the opportunity to handle it ahead of time!
Google’s geo-targeting feature is a great way to help you optimize your ad spend while providing you the flexibility to constantly test what works best for your business. Your marketing dollars are valuable so do what you can to make the most out of every opportunity!