AdWords MENA Blog: Geotargeting Puzzle

Its not a secret that the ability to precisely select a target audience is one of the major advantages of Google AdWords. By showing the Ads to the most interested users we are maximizing the return on investment and making it easier for the users to find information that is relevant to them. An AdWords tool that can help us do this is the Geotargeting tool.

It is extremely important that this tool be used properly as it allows us to precisely select our target audience. If used incorrectly however, it may harm the ad's impressions – or, even worse, show the ads outside of the target region.

In this blog post you will discover how to advertise a product or service located in a city to users located in another city, as well as gaining a deeper insight into the Geotargeting tool. To better explain this, we will illustrate it's use with an example – advertising hotels in Saint Petersburg to the users located in Moscow.

I. The Simplest Method

What is the simplest method that you can think of? Creating the keyword “hotel in Saint Petersburg” and targeting the campaign to Moscow? Well, it's not exactly that easy. Google detects the user's location, not only based on their IP address, but also through their search query, giving the search query a priority over the IP address.

So what happens in this particular example? The user from Moscow enters the query “hotels in Saint Petersburg” and the system, using the search query, determines that he is interested in the ads for Saint Petersburg – ignoring the physical location as search query has a priority. This is where it gets tricky! Since our campaign is targeting Moscow, not Saint Petersburg, we have a targeting mismatch and our ad is not serving, with the following keyword diagnostic message:

NB: In some rare cases, when name of the city is not in the beginning or end, but in the middle of a search query, your Ad may still appear – for example, the query “hotels in Saint Petersburg price”. However, this is not acceptable for us, as we are losing out on significant number of impressions – and potential customers.

II. Learn from our Mistakes

The first thing we are trying to do is to fix a problem by adding Saint Petersburg to our target locations – we are now prepared to show our Ads to the users both in Moscow and Saint Petersburg if this is the only solution. Initially this seems to work – we are checking if our Ads appear in Moscow, and they do appear – we are happy. But what happens next?

A user in another Russian city typed “hotels in Petersburg” and he has seen our Ad! This happened because the system has ignored his physical location and only looked at the search query. In fact, by adding Saint Petersburg to target regions we are now showing our Ads to everyone in Russia. This happens because system looks at the search query, determines it being related to Saint Petersburg and shows the Ad – irrespective of the physical location of the user.

This is disastrous – we don’t want to show our Ads to everyone, so go hunting for alternative solutions.

III. Working with exclusions

It is now clear that we will not get anywhere by including certain locations. But we also have the option of exclusions, maybe, we can use them? What is good is that we can now exclude users just by their physical location, but not by their search query – thanks to Advanced Geotargeting settings in the account. Here are the steps we shall follow:

In the Campaign’s settings we choose to target the whole Russia as a Country, and then by clicking “Exclude areas within selected locations” exclude all regions of Russia, except Moscow.
We make sure that our Advanced Geotargeting setting are set to default values and match the following settings:

Here we go! Our Ads are serving, and only to users in Moscow!

NB: Our Ads can also show to people, who search on google.ru website, but whose IP address does not belong to the excluded regions, but belong to, let’s say, Kiev or London – this is a very tiny risk we have to accept.

Conclusion

We hope that this article will shed some light on the logic of Geotargeting, will allow to solve this particular problem – but, most importantly, will give an idea on how to solve the other potential issues.

Written by Alexey Petrov - Google AdWords Team
Posted by Omar Selman - Google AdWords MENA