Google Ads Location Targeting
One of the things that we see when we go into accounts is people have their location targeting set up to be way too broad.
Now this happens a lot when I go and meet with local clients as well, and I’ll say, “Okay, how far do you want to go out from your location?”
We live in a metro area in Minneapolis, and they say, “I want the whole metro area.” But then they comes back and all of a sudden they say, “I have a service business and I don’t want to spend two hours in traffic to get all the way over to the east side of town if I don’t have to.” It’s too much.
That’s Just Too Much
Now, this isn’t happening just in metro areas. People are constantly setting up their PPC campaigns and showing them to the entire country (or world).
But Where Will My PPC Campaign Get Conversions?
When you look closer at it, typically most of your sales or conversions will come from the large metro areas or the states that have the biggest populations.
California, Illinois, Florida, Texas, and New York. Those are the 5 big states based on population.
That’s something else to ask yourself. Where do most of your conversions come from?
Maybe your product is a green product. If most of your conversions come from the west coast, then California is probably going to be your market. You need to see if that’s really happening.
Take a look at that. Why spend money in Michigan or in North Dakota, if all your conversions are coming from out on the west coast?
So when you go into your locations, see if you have the United States selected.
No if you look closely at the map, you can see that we are not showing these ads in our metro area. It’s an agreement that we have with this client and we’re not showing any of our ads in the Minneapolis metro area, but we’re showing them in the rest of the United States.
This is a brand new campaign, we don’t know exactly where our conversions are going to come from. That’s why we have the entire country set up. But I will say this, we used to have Canada in there as well, but we quickly found out that the conversions that we’re getting were all coming from the United States and only a couple from Canada, so we decided to cut that Canadian traffic out.
Take a look at what’s going on where you’re located. Where are you going to get most of your business and where do you want to get most of your business, and focus in your ads on that and build that out from there.
Once again going back to the metro example, when I speak to local clients, I usually tell them, “Start smaller, and if you need to, you can broaden out your territory.” Rather than spending two hours a day driving across town, why don’t you just stick closer to your office (let’s say a 10 mile radius) and see how that works out?
So that’s one of our best practices today, don’t waste money on locations that aren’t going to get you any business or conversions. When it comes down to it, narrow down your targeting.
We’ll see you next time.
Thanks for watching our video on: Narrowing Down Your Google Adwords Targeting