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How To Geo-Target a National PPC Campaign
August 17th, 2009 | Carrie | Advanced PPC Strategies, Geo Targeting


Typically pay-per-click managers who promote a nationally available product or service only run a nationally-targeted campaign. But they are missing a huge opportunity to serve relevant ads for local search queries.

With increasing competition in the SEM industry, advertisers are looking for more ways to optimize their campaign. By implementing geo-targeting for a National campaign, you can get ahead of the competition, become more relevant to your audience, and also take your advertising dollars further. It is time to dig deeper into your pay-per-click campaign!

How Do You Geo-Target a National PPC Campaign?

It’s easiest to start with an example. Say you are a company that provides phone service for most areas in the US. Your PPC account is setup at a national level allowing for your ads to appear for the following:

  • When people search phone service, your ads appear along with many competitors.
  • If someone searches for phone service in Denver, national ads also appear along with many competitors.

In the case of search query #2, the ad is not as relevant and targeted as it could be. For higher click-through rates and conversions, your ad text should be targeted using geographic modified keywords. In this case, you can create a campaign that has IP and keyword targeting set for Denver. Then when someone searches for ‘phone service in Denver’, your highly relevant ad text appears. Makes sense, right? But what happens if a customer is moving to Denver from another state?

In this case, you need to setup a national geo-targeted campaign. This will allow you to serve relevant ads for geographically targeted search queries at the National level. See the example below.

To setup a geo-targeted nation campaign, follow these easy steps:

  1. Open a new campaign that is targeted at the National level.
  2. Copy your highest volume ad group (i.e. Branded) into the new campaign
  3. Add geographic modifiers (at the city or state level) to each of the keywords. For example phone service becomes Denver phone service or phone service in Denver. Note: We recommend only including phrase and exact match types in this kind of targeting. Broad match keywords risk competing for National searches.
  4. Write targeted ad text utilizing your geographic modifiers.
  5. Add Denver as a negative to the original campaign. This will prevent your National ads from appearing for the local search.
  6. Repeat steps 2-5 for the additional geographic locations. To keep ad text targeted, only one geographic location should be assigned per ad group.

Spend your money wisely

Do your research before setting up any geographic targeted campaigns. Start with a Geographic Performance Report in Adwords. The Geographic Performance report will provide you with geo-targeted performance statistics for your ads by approximated geographic origin. With this report you can identify both high and low performing locations.

  • High Performing Locations: Focus your keyword targeting and budgets on the higher-performing locations for a geographic strategy. Adjust budgets and bids to maximize ROI.
  • Low performing Locations: Depending on your advertising objectives, I recommend you bid lower with smaller daily budgets, or exclude these areas completely. When it comes to the bottom line, minimizing your spend on lower performing areas can really help your ROI.

While the click volume generated through these campaigns will be smaller, you will be attracting highly qualified clicks, and you most likely will see increased conversions. Not to mention that you will stand out from your competitors with highly targeted, geographically relevant ad text. By focusing on high performing locations and decreasing resources on the underperformers, this geographic keyword strategy can take your pay-per-click advertising budgets a lot further.

Related posts:

  1. Your Target Audience May Be Larger than You Think
  2. Use Demographics To Geographically Target Your PPC Ads
  3. International PPC Campaigns: How to Target Outside the US With Success
  4. Ask PPC Hero! PPC Geo Targeting Best Practices
  5. A Closer Look at Regional Targeting

This entry was posted on Monday, August 17th, 2009 at 7:58 am and is filed under Advanced PPC Strategies, Geo Targeting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

  • http://instinctmarketing.com Brian

    You can also achieve this same effect by setting up a GEO targeted campaign as Google tends to turn off IP Geotargeting on local keywords making it a quasi national search. I have tested this down to suburbs outside of Boston. There are two benefits to this strategy:

    1) You gain the Geotargeted tag on line #4 from Google depending on your campaign settings. (e.g. Framingham, MA)
    2) Google may bless you with a slightly higher QS by marrying a local term with a local campaign.

    You may lose some traffic on the edge, but overall you may achieve a higher ROI by using a local campaign.

    Do you have any feedback on the pros and cons of going local versus national?

  • Joe Black

    Do you find that when you run a Geographic Performance Report in Google or use Analytics that the same three to four states show up at the top: California, Florida, Illinois and Texas?

    It just seems that these states end up with the most impressions, clicks, etc due to the size of the population. Do you see this too? Do you know how you can work around this or interpret the data differently?

    Thanks, Joe

  • http://www.webmarketingblog.com.br Giuliano

    Is there any way to do that automatic? Like the Dynamic Keywords?

  • http://www.siteproppc.com Al Kuenn

    Could you also set up ‘copy’ campaigns and let Google do the regional differentiation? Using your example you could set up a Denver targeted campaign using the same KW.

    Thanks,
    Al

  • Carrie

    @Brian Your #1 and #2 good points, and are benefits of setting up a local IP targeted campaign. However, I haven’t heard of Google turning off IP targeting when you have geo-qualifiers? Can you clarify this point?

    Local Pros – Points #1 and #2 in your post!

    Local Cons – Narrowing audience anytime you do local targeting. So if you need to reach a national audience with a more local message, then you may want to consider targeting local at a national level.

    @Joe Black We often see California, Florida, Illinois and Texas at the top of your geographic reports. A barrier of large populations! To work around this issue, you can look at campaign performance at the state level (assuming your campaigns are setup by state), and optimize for each area. If you are looking at the performance at a national level, then excluding this data excludes a large portion of the population, so your results could be skewed.

    Also see the same, large impression = large population. Can look at it on the state level, but also disregarding a large population.

    @Giuliano Unfortunately you cannot use dynamic keyword insertion at the keyword level. This only works for ad text.

    @Al Kuenn What you described is local targeting with general keywords. In this instance your campaign settings would only target, say the Denver area. If you want to target local at a national level (i.e I live in Chicago and am looking for a Denver-based service), then you want to copy your general keywords and add geographic modifiers to the front and/or back end of them.

  • http://www.ellertonwhitney.com Ellerton Whitney

    If you are adding geo-modified keywords as phrase and exact matches, and negativing out your geo-term on your national level, you may be missing out on searches. In your example, you are adding phrase and exact geo-modified Denver keywords, and adding “Denver” as a negative broad to the original campaign. You thus may be missing out on queries that would have formerly mapped to your Broad keyword (but not your phrase/exact because it is not specific enough) but now are not because Denver is a negative. Just something for others to consider.

  • http://physicaltherapyva.com Davinder

    Hello There,

    I have still doubt on the local and national ads. I have 7 locations in the state and all location has separate campaigns in account to target particular geo-area, I have used the custom tool to mark my geo for each of the location. Our each location cover 5 to 10 cities and I have added the citi like physical they in citi or physical therapy citi in each campaign.
    Now I want to create a national ad for my all the 7 locations collectively. If I create a new campaign with covering all the location, is my national ad over ride my all the local ads, if some body search ‘physical therapy in fairfax’ from out of the fairfax than only the national ad will appear but if the query in out of the fair fairfax area but not out of my other local area under my location #2 say WashingtonDC, what will appear my nation ad, my fair fairfax ad or my local ad in Washinton DC area.
    I am trying to say, if the user search for my location #1 from the Location #2 , what will happened? will it display my location #1 ad becuase user looking for this or it will display my location # 2 ad becuase user was in the area of location#2 or display national ad?

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