Targeting Local Customers

If you’re a local business, a plumber, for example, searchers type; plumber birmingham or emergency plumber birmingham. They also type; emergency plumber or sometimes just plumber.

To target traffic effectively, create two AdWords campaigns;

• one for keywords that include place names (plumber birmingham etc), targeting a large area (searches with place names in qualify the traffic as relevant) and;
• the other using Exact match terms without a place (plumber, emergency plumber) – use location targeting for this campaign to target only the area you can service.

Each campaign will have a different CTR and conversion rate, but you’ll target a greater volume of traffic and generate more enquiries.

Targeting Multiple Countries

First build a campaign with great structure, keywords and ad copy and prove that it works well, delivering a strong CTR and conversion rates. Using the offline editor (much quicker) copy that campaign, target additional countries as necessary separately from the main campaign.

You may wish to target multiple countries with that second campaign initially, later fragmenting in to country-specific campaigns to improve the measurement of ROI from each location and what messages that audience responds to.

Take care with this method though, success will depend on your market, search volume and budget – don’t slice it too thin or you risk compromising quality score and missing out on opportunities.

Segmenting Customers by Location

Split-testing regions is an advanced technique and is often difficult to justify. However, in principle, you could have duplicate campaigns targeting different areas within a country; does your campaign and message perform better in the North or the South? How do the conversion rates, ad copy and landing pages compare?

High traffic volumes are required to justify such a strategy, but could reveal valuable insight in to your audience and reward you with a competitive advantage you may not have expected.

Maximising a Smaller Budget with Location Targeting

Minimise geography to maximise your budget.

We know that impression share and search funnels are critical for conversion rates for many campaigns.

With a limited budget, it is generally far better to have a 100% impression share in a smaller geographic area than a 50% impression share across the whole country. You can optimise as usual with all relevant keywords and ad copy, proving conversion rates.

Once proven, increasing geography and budget takes minutes and it’s usual to expect ROI to scale perfectly with this strategy, provided the budget accommodates the increase in search volume.

Getting Geeky with AdWords Location Targeting

Most advertisers don’t realise that targeting the UK on Google Search targets both users with a UK-specific IP address AND users globally searching using the Google.co.uk domain. That’s right – anyone outside of the UK will see your ads if the use Google.co.uk and you’ll pay for those clicks too, of course.

It is possible to use negative locations too. For example, targeting the UK and excluding England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales etc, will leave a target audience of overseas users searching using Google.co.uk.

Remember, using the AdWords offline editor, this campaign could be duplicated from another campaign in your account with different targeting, allowing you to effectively measure CPCs, CTRs, ad copy and ROI for this audience segment.

Again, depending on traffic volumes, you could segment the rest of the world in to smaller chunks if you need to measure the ROI from European or US-based Google.co.uk users, or even country by country if there’s enough search volume.

Divide and conquer!

Google is More than Google Search

An option in the settings for each campaign, it is important to understand the impact of selecting this option. Left at its default setting, ads will run on three networks,  Google search, Google search partners and the Display Network.

The Display network represents a very different strategy to Search, has different objectives and a significantly different structure and approach to Search. Google contextually matches your ads with content on forums, discussion boards, advice sites, news sites and much more.

Display can and does produce great results, but if you’re new to AdWords, turn it off for now and come back to it later. Otherwise, it should at least be targeted using a separate campaign with its own budget and performance metrics.

Targeting Local Customers

For businesses that target a local area, this function is extremely beneficial. Ideal for plumbers, plasterers, hairdressers and PC repairs, but there are many more. If you’re a plumber in London, this allows you to exclude searches on Google from locations outside of London, for example.

Combined with a separate keyword strategy of bidding only on search terms which include places your business can service, you’ll ensure that clicks are highly relevant and improve performance.

Using Highly Relevant Keywords

When selecting which keywords to use in your campaign, there is one simple rule to follow to ensure your traffic is relevant: only use keywords which are precisely what you provide in terms of products or services featured on your website.

For example, if you sell a range of hand knitted jumpers, there’s little point in bidding on “jumpers” – it represents far too many other products that you don’t sell. Better to qualify this as “hand knitted jumpers”, “knitted jumpers”, “woolly jumpers”, “ladies knitted jumpers”, which would be much more accurate and produce greater ROI.

Keywords which are not exactly what you provide are much less likely to convert into sales, leads or enquiries – you’ll most likely burn your budget with little to show for it.

Relevance is Critical

For best performance, organise your keywords in to tightly themed groups and show highly relevant ads. Google will respect your relevance and so will the audience. You’ll get a much higher CTR, higher ad positions, more clicks and more sales. Grouping terms together like this is the purpose of an Ad Group in your account – use it!

Using the jumpers example, you would create an ad group for all the “knitted jumper” keywords with a knitted jumper ad, a group for  the “woolly jumper” keywords  with woolly jumper ads and “ladies knitted jumpers” in a group with ladies’ knitted jumper ads.

Landing Page Selection

Selecting the most relevant page on your site is a great way of making the search process simpler, quicker and easier. If the search is “ladies knitted  jumper” land them on the ladies knitted  jumpers page. Google rewards your relevance with a better quality score and higher ad positions, your customer has a better experience and is more likely to convert in to an enquiry or a sale.

Read more of the basics at: AdWords Basics Part Two.

We’ve been working on Facebook pay-per-click campaigns for a number of our clients. It is really easy to get started and target your intended demographic audience and /or groups they might belong to.

If you’re a recruitment company, you might target an industry group, or a large employer (careful though!). Or if you sell bouncy castles or kid’s party planning, you might target Mums’ groups in a particular location, or a ticket sales company might target groups of fans of particular artists. University students could be targeted for backpacking holidays, or fishermen targeted for rods and tackle.

The Facebook opportunity is pretty endless.

Facebook pay per click advertising became a much more viable option for us once conversion tracking was available, and provides an effective method of monitoring your results and tracking sales and enquiries from your Facebook spend. Provided the tracking code is implemented correctly, you’ll now be able to see how effective your campaign is.

A Facebook campaign will not only drive more traffic to your site, but also increase brand awareness which will assist your Google, Yahoo! and Bing search campaign(s) too. Whilst we’re not currently spoiled with the view through conversion tracking to really measure the additional influence, hopefully that will come as Facebook’s advertising platform matures.

Facebook Pay per Click Advertising Basics

1. Create a new profile for your business, just like you would for an individual
2. At the bottom of your new profile page click “Advertising”
3. Create an ad with compelling ad copy and an attention-grabbing image
4. Select your audience by demographic – age range, gender, location and so forth
5. Narrow that audience by selecting relevant groups they belong to
6. Generate the conversion tracking code for sales and enquiries and add it to the ”Thank You” page on your site, just like AdWords.
7. Complete your billing information
8. Set it live once your ad is approved by the Facebook team

We’d recommend starting small, a little toe in the water,  perhaps £5 – £10 per day and scale up after a week if it starts to work effectively.

Ask a question about this:

If you really want to be able to measure performance and optimise your campaign effectively, there’s a little more to it.

Example

Dennis and Steve run a garden landscaping business in the South West of England.

Their campaign uses location targeting, of course. There’s a main ad group, already bidding on all the relevant terms; landscaping, best landscaping, landscaping experts, landscaping company, landscaping firm and so forth.

There are also other ad groups with keywords and ads relevant to each geographic area that services are offered; an ad group for Bristol, and ad group for Somerset, and ad group for Bath. All great practice that will demonstrate relevance to the audience and improve their CTR.

What They Missed

But here’s something they hadn’t considered:

Keyword 1: landscaping company – shows a generic Landscaping ad

Keyword 2: landscaping Bristol – shows a Bristol Landscaping ad.

When a searcher types in “landscaping company bristol“, Google has to guess which of your keywords is most relevant. Remember, Google AdWords is a piece of software that measures words, it has no idea that the word Bristol is more important than the word company in this example.

Clearly, this is a very simple example to demonstrate the point. The obvious remedy is also to bid on the keyword “landscaping company bristol” in the Bristol ad group, of course.

But your campaign is going to be a whole lot more complicated, with a whole lot more keyword variations, so the most effective solution (for this example, anyway) is this:

Use each of the locations as negative keywords in your generic ad groups.

Therefore, it would be good practice to use Bristol as a negative keyword in the main landscaping ad group. This tells Google that if the searcher is looking for landscaping services in Bristol, their search matches only keywords in the Bristol ad group and the searcher sees Bristol Landscaping ads and nothing else.

Lower Cost Per Click

This practice will improve your Click Through Rate (CTR), and improve your overall quality score and lead to a reduced cost per click and therefore a reduced Acquisition Cost.

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Even if you don’t want to target specific demographics, there could be an incredible amount of value in the new reports you’ll get to measure and compare your success across a demographic spread.

Inside AdWords: Demographic bidding beta test

Google says:

Demographic bidding and reports are available to advertisers who run contextually targeted or placement-targeted campaigns (with CPC or CPM bidding) on certain sites in the Google content network. Here’s how it works: Some publishers in our network, such as social networking sites, know the gender and age of their users because their users sign in with that information when they create a profile or fill out registration or subscription forms. Participating publishers anonymize this user reported demographic data and then send it to Google in aggregate form, allowing us to adjust which ads are shown to members of specific demographic groups. (To protect user privacy, AdWords receives this data only from publishers that have permission from users to share their data according to the site’s terms and conditions. Users are never identified personally, but only as anonymous aggregated data in the demographic reports. And to protect the privacy of minors, users under 18 can’t be targeted demographically.)

Bear in mind that this only applies to the Content Network, not Google Search or the Search Network.

That’s fine, to a point – but what if you don’t, or can’t sell to everyone, everywhere?

If you’re selling a book, a CD, a set of golf clubs or some consumer product online, you might want to advertise everywhere. But in one campaign? Perhaps not. And if your service or product is most often supplied in person – let’s say hairdressing, construction, car repairs, plumbing, new or used cars, houses – whatever, you’d be well advised to target people local to you, particularly with a smaller budget.

You should first know how location targeting works:

1. Google predetermines a searcher’s location through their IP address. Most of us have a unique one, assigned by our ISP. And again *most* IP addresses are geographic in nature, meaning that rather like a telephone number, it identifies which country or town you are in. This is true for the majority of IP addresses. However, a minority of users’ IP addresses do not accurately reflect their location. The result is that your ads could be displayed to a user outside of your chosen location(s). In all fairness, this is an IP address issue, not Google’s problem.
2. Google also uses the location you have selected to include the place names as keywords. Let’s say that you’re targeting the Birmingham area, and 50 miles around. Google decides that your bid on the keyword ‘pest control’ is more relevant to someone searching for ‘birmingham pest control’ than a competitor targeting the entire country, as indeed would a search for ‘walsall pest control’, or ‘dudley pest control’.

Just how granular these location-matches are is unclear. For example, it is possible to choose a town to target, but not all towns are available in the list: London, of course, is fine, but what about Guildford? Or Mansfield? Or Marlow? And how about Richmond – that is in the list, but means Yorkshire, not South West London (and they don’t tell you that unless you ask, by the way).

So, for a service provider, you might want to use the option of a radius of your location. Start with a larger radius, monitor your budget usage each day and reduce the radius until your budget lasts the whole day. I know that you might quite happily sell your service to a market beyond this and agree that it seems odd to not advertise to that audience. But unless you’re going to increase your budget to capture all those clicks all day, you’re better off concentrating on clicks that have the best chance of ‘converting‘ to a sale, picking up the phone or actually becoming a customer – and those are the people that are closest to you.

Selling country-wide or internationally, you should still use location targeting. Split your campaign(s) – target each for a chosen location. Perhaps there’s a slightly different message for people in different locations – no point in telling people in Ireland or Canada that there’s “FREE UK NEXT DAY DELIVERY!” – why do they care? Even if that doesn’t put them off clicking your ad, you’re wasting valuable space for a more compelling message.

Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, splitting your campaigns will mean that you’ll be much more able to measure how the campaigns are performing. Here’s an example.

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Given the cost of the conversion, if we’d spent that £689.89 budget on the UK instead, we’d have made 252 sales – nearly twice those made in Canada, and double the profit.

If a cost of £5.38 per sale is fine (and I’m sure it is for most businesses!), you’re still better off knowing where your budget is working hardest for you and where your successes and failures are coming from. The tools are at your disposal – use them to your advantage.

So, to summarise: with careful keyword selection and location targeting, you can easily create a message that compels each specific audience. The keyword ‘magazine printing’ might get your ad lots of impressions, but targeting 30 miles of Birmingham with the keyword ‘cheap magazine printing’ means that you’ll know a whole lot more about that searcher before they even see your ad, right? In your ad, tell them you’re in Birmingham and tell them your prices are keen, too – they’ll be much more likely to click your ad, and more likely to land you a sale for the cost of a few clicks.

Find out how you can improve your campaign one hour.

Using the example of a campaign selling hubcaps, if you don’t sell Renault hubcaps, make sure you use “-Renault” in your campaign. If you provide a service in a particular geographic area, get a list of all of the places outside of that area and include them as negative keywords.

Using Google, search for your keywords and see what results come up. Retry your search using search term -keyword -keyword -keyword in the search box, keep applying this until all of the irrelevant results are filtered from your search. Whatever negative keywords are now included in your search query, add to your ad groups or campaigns so that others users searching or those irrelevant terms don’t see your ad.

This improves your quality score, and therefore the cost per click for your ad or improves your position. The improvement in your position should increase your click through rate (CTR). The increase in click through rate is rewarded with a better quality score, which again then should reduce your cost per click.

It pays to be relevant.

Get more tips in the Free AdWords Guide, or contact me to discuss your campaign.