Increase Your Local PPC Performance
source: www.ppchero.com
Google and Yahoo have updated their geo- targeting tools recently, which make it easer to target local areas or certain parts of the world. So, start thinking about your business specifically and where your audience is, and ask if you have set up your geo-targeting settings correctly? You may be surprised to find out you’re targeting to the wrong audience in the wrong area of the country or world even.
If you are unsure of when or where to geo-target or even why you should set up geo-targeting for your PPC campaigns, read on…
Why to Geo-Target: The beginning process of marketing in any facet is to understand your target audience. When it comes to PPC advertising and marketing online in general, you have the option of casting a wide net across the world, or as small a net as your own neighborhood.
If you leave it up to Google, Yahoo and MSN to set your PPC campaigns to the default geo-targeting settings, you could be spending a lot of cash advertising to people who are #1, not your target audience, and #2, not even in your target area. The default settings in Google target all new PPC accounts to the US and Canada. Well, if you own a plumbing service company in Marion, Kentucky, do you really want to advertise to people in Canada? I think not!
When to Geo-Target: Think about your business and where your target audience is located mainly. It can be different for every industry. If you own the plumbing service company in Marion Kentucky then you know you should only target to people in the surrounding cities. However, if you own a large ecommerce store and can ship anywhere in the USA or Europe, then you can cast that wider net and target to everyone living in the USA or Europe.
How to Geo-Target: The “how” is simple, once you figure out where you want to geo-target, you can simply login to your Google Adwords or Yahoo or MSN PPC accounts and under the settings tab you can select specific areas of a city, state, region, country, etc. You can literally geo-target to as small as an area like a city or as large as the entire world if you wish.
Now, I’ve only given you a primer on geo-targeting in this post. To learn more specific instructions on how, when, why and where to geo-target you’ll have to come back next week for the full series. See you then!
Running the proper reports within Google AdWords and Google Analytics can pave the way to geo-targeted success! You may already know where you locally targeted PPC ads should appear, then you’re ahead of the game. But suppose you want to discover where your ads are “hot” and where they are “not.” There are a few reports that will help you get this information.
First, why do you want to run these reports. If you are currently running a nationally focused campaign and you want to get more granular with your targeting, these reports can help you learn in which country/state/province/city you may want to target your ads. Also, you may discover that there are specific areas that don’t convert well at all. You can exclude these locations from your PPC distribution.
Let’s review the AdWords Geographic Performance report first. Within the reporting tab, you’ll see the Geographic Performance report option
This is the report you’ll run to get your geographic performance data. Next, you’ll want to adjust your advanced settings. Do you want data at the country/territory, Region, Metro or City Level? Or all of them?
Within your advanced settings you’ll also want to select all of the appropriate conversion data as well. This report is extremely helpful and will allow you to gain insight into your where your ads are performing best.
However, there is one gripe I have with this report. And it’s a big one. You can run the geographic performance with only a daily time frame. This means I can’t get the information in summary. If I want to know how multiple campaigns are performing on the west coast, I need to run this report and then aggregate the information together because it is served to me in daily doses. I just want to know for the past 60 days how may ads have faired on the west coast… but I’ll have to added up all the stats. Takes up time and it’s a hassle. Big thumbs down on that.
To create a custom report you need to chose from two lists: metrics and dimensions. As you can see below, the metrics I have chosen are “new visits” and “goal1 completions.” This data will be broken down by Country/Territory, Region and City. And it’s just that easy! You will need to have goals set up within Google Analytics to pull this kind of report.
These are two methods for which you can pull your geographic performance. Once you have pulled the proper reports, then you can get to analyze this data to determine where you should focus your geo-targeting efforts.
