15
2009
Jan

Adwords Geo Targeting – The Other Side of the Story

The idea behind geo targeting your Adwords is that you can serve your ads exclusively to people within a certain geographic range. For example you can choose to serve just the United States, Only California, or just a few cities around your office. Everybody understands how this is supposed to work but marketing is never that simple. Geo targeting is a lot more complicated than that and Google doesn’t always choose to adhere to your preset geo targets.

The first tricky part about geo targeting is determining where a search came from. Judging geographic location based on IP addresses isn’t particularly an exact science. For example, my house is in Arroyo Grande but according to Google Analytics visits from these locations have registered as Pismo Beach, San Luis Obispo, and Santa Margarita. Those are 5, 17, and 26 miles away from my computer respectively. When you’re geo-targeting you have to realize that you need to target where your customers attach to the internet, not necessarily where they physically are. We find if you draw your own custom target ranges that it’s a best practice to draw your area a little wide especially if you’re dealing with small towns. Also you’re pretty much dreaming if you think you can effectively split a city. You can draw a geo target that only covers the north side of town, but who knows how many people on the north side actually attach to the internet via servers on the north side. This gets even more exciting with proxy servers, mobile services, masked IP addresses, privacy software, and lots of other technical challenges.

The other thing that makes geo targeting a little more exciting is the Google factor. Google has a tendency to be “helpful,” especially if they can pick up a buck in the process (…think Automatic Matching and Budget Optimizers). When you geo target a campaign they take this as a firm suggestion not an absolute directive. All of your geo targeting efforts can be overridden by the right query. As far as Google is concerned relevance trumps geographic campaign settings. Because of this I can get an ad for a Milwaukee Lawyer here in California despite his geo targeting effort to cover just his corner of Wisconsin. This could be a good or a bad thing and that’s why you need to know that this can happen.

The upside is a that searcher making a super specific search like “Huntsville Alabama exterminator” is probably very interested in ads targeted to Huntsville even if the searcher is on the other side of the country. By Google deciding to serve this ad you are getting in front of a searcher that you could have never planned for or anticipated. There are a million reasons why someone from out of town would look for a product or service in another location… preparing to move, their kids go to college there, planning a vacation, they’re on vacation and planning to buy something when they get home, researching for a friend, etc. These are people who don’t fit your geo target but are specifically searching for your business.

Ultimately this is a Public Service Announcement type of post because Google will serve what they feel is relevant and you can’t stop them. On top of geo targeting you do have one last line of defense, exclusions. Within a targeted area you can choose to exclude certain cities, states, or regions. For example say that you have a tourism site for Austin, TX that is focused on bringing visitors to the city, but you don’t want to spend money on local visitors. You could target the entire state of Texas and exclude Austin. It’s not a perfect fix but it is one more layer of defense against Google deciding what they think you would want. In our testing of this, Google seems to respect exclusionary boundaries much more than inclusionary boundaries.

The bottom line is that Google puts forth a good effort to follow your geographic preferences. The system is somewhat imperfect, but so is almost everything in marketing.