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Google Says You Should be Including Canada in All Your PPC Campaigns, What!?Posted by Amber on November 6, 2008 in Google AdWords |
In the Google newsletter yesterday they announced that they will be automatically including Canada in all new campaigns. If you don’t want to target Canada you must remember to go into your campaign and remove the country from your geo-targeting settings.
We want to call your attention to a change in the campaign set-up process. The default location targeting setting now defaults to the United States and Canada as opposed to just the United States. If you don’t want to include Canada, you’ll need to update that setting before running the campaign, says Google.
I think for people who are geo-targeting a very specific area this probably won’t be a problem since they’ll have to reset their geo-targeting settings anyway. But for people who are targeting the US will need to remember to go back in and check their settings if they can’t service or deliver to Canada. And that I find to be an incredibly annoying aspect of this change.
As most advanced PPC advertisers know you always check your campaign settings before launching your account, or new campaign. However a lot of newbies don’t know to do that and automatically including Canada in their search advertising could hurt their ROI. Who knows how long their account could be running before they finally realize they’re targeting Canada when they shouldn’t be?
Does anyone else out there feel that this is just another way Google is trying to get people’s money, but in the wrong way? All comments are welcome!
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November 6th, 2008 at 10:45 am
this is horrible, i am a canadian who runs alot of canada only campaigns. the last thing i want to see is big budget American firms unknowingly targeting the clogging up search results, with high bid price ads, completely irrelevant to Canadian customers. this problem currently exists on yahoo, also their platform sucks, the interface isterrible and they are horrible to deal with… oops Freudian slip.
November 6th, 2008 at 11:26 am
Seems the fairest solution would be to have new campaign default to no countries at all. Then make you select at least one country when you set up the campaign. That re-emphasizes that the settings exist (and can be changed) and confirms you are knowingly selecting certain countries.
November 6th, 2008 at 11:36 am
Agreed, having to go in manually each time to remove Canada per campaign is not OK. That’s just adding one more facet for people new to PPC to be tripped up on (like the auto inclusion in the content network with search network bids) and it’s reeks of more accidental revenue in the same way for Google.
November 6th, 2008 at 12:29 pm
I think an annoying attempt to raise Q4 profits.
November 6th, 2008 at 1:09 pm
Glen, Phil, Elizabeth and Jonathan, thanks for your comments. I’m glad to hear you guys have the same thoughts as me. What is Google thinking?!
November 6th, 2008 at 5:06 pm
Just as bad as them opting you in for content search when starting new campaigns.
November 6th, 2008 at 5:06 pm
Agreed that it is an annoying way to increase revenue. What would the value added benefit being of making this change? It is one extra step we have to remember in order to ensure dollars are spent where we want them.
Also, I think it really takes advantage of newer PPC advertisers who may not be as aware of default settings in Adwords.
Great post though. Thanks!
November 7th, 2008 at 9:26 am
It’s beyond annoying when I’m setting up a campaign for a Canadian client and I forget to change the default from US to Canada. I can certainly understand the frustrations American advertisers are going to have because of this. Even though any experienced search marketer knows to check their settings, it’s really easy to forget once in a while especially if you’re doing SEM for a lot of clients.
I agree with Phil on this one. I’d like to see it left blank and you can’t go live with your campaign until you set your geo-targeting options.
November 7th, 2008 at 10:59 am
Unreal.
All that lip-service about long-term health, quality, transparency, etc. is just that: lip-service.
Google sounds like the government: “We are going to help you by taking more of your money and spending it inefficiently.”
November 7th, 2008 at 3:52 pm
I disagree with this decision almost as much as ‘auto including’ new advertisers into the content network. Its amazing … almost every newbie client that comes to me complaining of low CTR can easily attribute most of their percieved non-performing campaign to the content network. I suppose I’ll have to add checking geo-targets to my ‘first things first’ list as well. I’m sure they’ll manipulate this into their quality scoring somehow as well and then not tell anyone!
November 7th, 2008 at 3:58 pm
Just another way to get more money from freshmen advertisers.
November 8th, 2008 at 2:14 pm
Google showing their schizo side again.
This is another of those more is better policies that seems to fly in the face of what I consider a basic Google, especially AdWords, creed.
Quality is better than Quantity.
I always hate to see these default settings that hammer the uninformed.
-Tom Hale
AdWords Specialist