Geo-Targeting Strategies for Paid Search
Often, geo-targeting your paid search campaign is vital to achieving success and meeting your ROI objectives. It allows you to target search engine users by location, ensuring you don’t pay for clicks from users who would not want or cannot get to your offering. As many of you already know, being able to target and pre-qualify your audience so precisely is one of the core benefits of Internet marketing. There are two main tactics to implement a paid search geo-targeting strategy and this blog will tell you how to do just that.
Before we go further, let’s first examine when geo targeting is necessary. Whether your company serves customers in the immediate area or across the globe, geo-targeting your paid search campaign generally proves valuable. For the sake of example, let’s say that you manage an online Home & Garden store with a national customer base that sells a variety of products. Among these products two of your best sellers are snow shovels and orange tree starter kits for the casual gardener. Obviously each product is targeted towards different customers in distinct parts of the country. It definitely doesn’t make sense to advertise snow shovels in Florida just as it’s not logical to promote the sale of orange trees in Maine. This hypothetical situation clearly presents the need for a geo-targeted paid search campaign.
As you can see, depending on your business and audience, you need to geo-target in specific ways to successfully reach your target audience and optimize your campaign. There are two different ways to do this:
1.) Geo-target your campaign by actual location (country, state, city, zip etc)
2.) Use geographic identifiers within your keyword selection to pre-qualify Web browsers
If you are geo-targeting by location, examine your campaigns and determine the geographic radius that each product or service will appeal to. Each of the big three search engines provide the functionality to pinpoint where your text ads will be served at the campaign level, as they are able to determine the location of their users based on IP address. Expanding on the examples previously mentioned, you would want to select cold weather states that consistently get snow for a snow shovel campaign and would probably only market the orange trees within Florida and California. The selection process is done within the campaign’s settings and one can literally choose the states and cities within which they would like their ads to appear. Depending on the engine, they may allow you to determine customized geo-targeting by drawing lines on a map – but, at a minimum you will at least be able to geo-target by location to the city level within Google Adwords, MSN adcenter and Yahoo Search Marketing.
Another method that can be used is having the keywords you bid on essentially become geo-targeted by adding geographic identifiers within the actual keyword. For example, to market Rise Interactive’s services on a nationwide basis we bid on the word “Chicago Internet Marketing Agency.” We do not bid on the word “Internet Marketing Agency” unless it is geo-targeted using the previously mentioned campaign settings to the Chicago metro area due to the concern of having to pay for unqualified clicks. By adding the geographic identifier “Chicago” to our nationwide campaign, we know that potential clients who may be in Los Angeles or New York City have qualified themselves as looking for a Chicago-based agency. These users may be Chicago-based executives who are in the aforementioned cities on a business trip but are interested in hiring an Internet marketing agency upon their return home.
If you use the geographic identifier within a keyword strategy it is extremely important not to use the Adwords broad match type or its equivalent in the other engines. If using broad match you run the risk of your ad being served even when the geographic identifier is not present in the user’s query. This happens because, at times, when using the broad match type, the search engines serve your ad not only when a searcher queries the words in your keyword phrase in any order, but also when terms related to your keyword phrase that the search engine deems relevant are present. In this scenario you may obtain (and have to pay for) unqualified Web traffic. Read more about this issue in a previous blog titled Keyword Relevancy and the Broad Match Type.
Regardless of whether you geo-target by keyword phrases or limit your campaign settings to include only specific geographic areas, the opportunity to target your online advertisements to this detail is invaluable. Not only are you pre-qualifying your Web traffic, you are also spending your campaign dollars in an efficient manner, avoiding waste. In order to see the best results from your paid search campaign, be sure to use these optimization tips to increase your ROI and customer acquisition.
Tags: Geo Targeting
[...] The first way to do so is to avoid spending money on clicks from audiences you don’t or cannot provide your product or service to. By default, campaigns advertise on the nation-wide level, so it’s important to geo-target as needed to spend your budget efficiently. For example, a local restaurant will only appeal to a small geographic region whereas a clothing retailer who ships product nationally will have broader consumer demand. Bottom line—don’t waste your money advertising to consumers who have no interest in or ability to reach your product or service. To learn more about geo-targeting, read Geo-targeting Strategies for Paid Search. [...]