Comments on: Location Targeting in Google Adwords Gets Revamped

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 21:25:00 +0000

That’s odd. I copied a campaign using the editor yesterday and it brought the geotarget settings with it. Were you using the editor or the interface?

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 21:25:00 +0000

Hopefully they’ll refine it to make it more useful for you!

By: Justins

Justins — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 20:59:00 +0000

Also, it seems that Google doesn’t allow you to copy location settings from campaign to campaign anymore, so you have to manually redo the location settings for every campaign!

By: JustinS

JustinS — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 20:54:00 +0000

The changes are definitely worse. Instead of drawing the custom shape of a county, now I have to depend on Google to accurately list all the towns within that county (which they don’t). This forces me as an advertiser to increase the size of the radius outside of the territory I want to advertise in (counties aren’t perfect circles, google). Simply put, if Google does not have the city in their database and that part of the county is a “corner” (two lines perpendicular to one another), a circle does me no good! This forces advertisers to either cut off small pieces of the service area or advertise outside of the service area.

By: Jeff Allen

Jeff Allen — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 13:44:00 +0000

It looks like they have some refining to do. Do you feel the new changes have made it better than it was before? Or plain just missed the boat?

By: JulieJ

JulieJ — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 13:17:00 +0000

I agree with the counties problem Justins. My PPC account needs to target an area of 80 miles from lets say Coventry. The radius allowed me to select several big areas, but completely missed some large towns. I entered these individually and they showed up as having a high reach, so why wasn’t they included in the original list Google provided to to add in the 80 mile radius. Seems a good update to the location search, but counties would be better to target.

By: Jeff Allen

Jeff Allen — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 19:25:00 +0000

I tested what you are talking about here and saw the same thing. Big time bummer. I bounced a few locations off areas I know well and they were fairly close to what I would expect to see. So not sure what percent of the time they are on/off. No matter how accurate/inaccurate they are, I would only use the Reach numbers as one factor out of many to determine to target an area. Such as; past performance in that geo-target, locations in the area, and location demo info.

By: Jeff Allen

Jeff Allen — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 19:16:00 +0000

No word on targeting by County, sorry. The radius targeting feature gets you pretty close. You type in a city, and choose a radius (in miles) to target. I did this for a few areas I know well and was able to keep the borders pretty well aligned with the County borders. Not a lot of help if you don’t know the territory well.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 19:12:00 +0000

It also says that you get a much bigger reach by targeting Belfast instead of N.Ireland. which is clearly wrong, and makes you wonder how accurate all the other estimates are..

By: Justins

Justins — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 18:47:00 +0000

It would be helpful if Google would allow us to target by county as well! So many small businesses operate by county, and area codes usually follow suit with counties. Any word from Google on this?