Comments on: How To Geo-Target a National PPC Campaign

By: Ellerton Whitney

Ellerton Whitney — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 21:44:33 +0000

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.

By: Carrie

Carrie — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 19:48:55 +0000

@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.

By: Al Kuenn

Al Kuenn — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 22:24:16 +0000

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

By: Giuliano

Giuliano — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 22:19:20 +0000

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

By: Joe Black

Joe Black — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 13:25:59 +0000

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

By: Brian

Brian — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 11:28:48 +0000

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?