There is so much going on in the world of PPC lately that we’re spending an entire week introducing the changes and letting you know how to make the most of them. It goes beyond Google’s new “Enhanced Campaigns” feature to Facebook and Analytics. Over the next week, PPC Hero is going to take a look at each of these updates in a series of posts designed to get you ready for all of the added functionality, the new best practices and even more.
There are a lot of things PPC managers are hatin’ on with enhanced campaigns. Just take a gander on twitter at #enhancedcampaigns. But the new geo targeting feature isn’t one of those things. They’re one of the features that form a pretty silver lining around the grey, doomy cloud that is enhanced campaigns. Like this:
You can find your location settings in your fancy, new enhanced campaign right here:
In here you can do this:
Bid locations up or down by a % increase or decrease. All in one campaign. That’s pretty awesome! As far as I can tell, you can still choose location targeting at the campaign level, so if you need different budget control or campaign level settings for different locations–looks like you can still do that. I still see this in the settings tab for my enhanced campaign:
In keeping with the theme of silver linings for enhanced campaigns, I’ll not delve into how silly it is that we can have this dual functionality for geo targeting but not for other things like device segmentation. I’ll not get into how I feel this is a deliberate ploy to get more money at the cost of client ROI, either! I’ll just focus on how lovely having this duel functionality for geo targeting is. It’s awesome!
Here’s how to take advantage of this feature for accounts that don’t require large, segmented geo targeted campaigns. I’m looking at YOU pizza shops.
1. Go to the Dimensions Tab
Change the “view” to “geographic”. From here, download a report segmented by whatever geo targets you’re interested in. You can customize that with the little button labeled “columns”. If you are only targeting the US, I’d start with a state analysis. Unless you have a huge account with super high volume, then maybe just go right for metro area. If you’re dealing with a smaller account, metro area might be too low volume to deal with. Then, you should be able to see based on countries, states, or whatever you segmented by, what your performance looks like. Make sure you’ve got a good chunk of data time, clicks, and impressions wise. Then you can examine conversion rates by segmentation and figure out what bids should be for each based on your goals.
Now, here’s one snag I’ve ran into with enhanced campaigns: I don’t have conversion count or conversion rate data for locations. I do, however, have value/conversion data, which I can use to get conversion rate data since most of my accounts just figure a 1 for each conversion in terms of value. I believe this is just a bug that will be fixed soon, but it is super annoying. When I first switched my campaign over to enhanced, I didn’t have conversion reporting anywhere in that campaign any more. So, they fixed that, it’s just in location now.
2. Change Bids Based on Report Findings
So, if you find that conversion rates for California are 30% higher than average, bid 30% higher to get all those extra conversions! Of course this will be something, like bids, you need to test by setting bids in the most data driven way possible–then analyze, change, and test some more!
So, in summary: location changes seem like a super cool change, especially for smaller accounts that can’t justify segmenting a million geo targeted campaigns but could still benefit from geo targeted bids.
