Mountain View, California — In a crowded world, many businesses that only offer a service or product in a localize area, it can be a very good idea to use location-targeting in AdWords. The search engine giant Google has just announced some improved location-targeting AdWords functionality that many advertisers should be very happy about.
Now, you can target or omit specific physical user locations. This facility to manage if your ads are visible or not visible based on the searcher’s location or the searcher’s location intent, or both. This can help save money and maximize return-on-investment (ROI) by only displaying their ads to the target audience that are most likely to convert.
For instance, if you own a restaurant in a certain county, then it would be very expensive to advertise to the entire world, besides, it is a lot less possible that someone in Scotland is going to travel all the way to Essex, for example, for a meal.
“By physical location, we mean the place where the user is actually situated, such as ‘New York City,’ instead of the location that is included in the search query, such as ‘restaurants in New York’,” explains Google’s Lisa Shieh. “In addition, we have revised the default setting for locations that you do not want to reach and made it more in line with your requests.”
“Because the use of upgraded location choices will restrict your ad exposure, we recommend that you use these location targeting settings only when your advertising goals specifically call for more granular controls,” she adds.
How does it work?
Under your campaign settings, under the standard location options, click on the “advanced location options.” Then you will have a “Targeting method” and “Exclusion method.” You can then define there how you want to target by location.
For example, if you were advertising a San Francisco hotel, you might only prefer to show your ads to people who searched for “San Francisco hotels,” regardless of their current geographical location. In that case, you would choose “”Target using search intent.” Thus, people currently located in San Francisco who search for “hotels” would not see your ads.
Therefore, it is much more prudent to add location-specific settings to this type of AdWords campaign in order to only show the ads to people searching within a chosen radius of the business, or to people that specify in their search that they are looking for that product / service within the chosen area.
Alternatively, if you wish to target only those physically in a specified location you could “Target using physical location.”
These new options can also be utilized for exclusion, so you could exclude either by physical location or by search intent. For instance, a wedding venue might want to promote special costs for accommodation to people outside their area in order to encourage them to travel further, but not offer that promotion to people in the immediate area and could therefore exclude it.
It is interesting to see that Google is making it easier to manage geographic searches, but you should be aware that it is not 100% reliable, but only if it improves this kind of targeting even more going forward. Imagine being able to target/exclude based on even more precise location than city. Think neighborhoods, or even specific malls, stores, and shopping centers.
These more granular controls come at a time when Google is bolstering its offerings to local businesses, partly in response to the increase in location-based searches coming in from smartphones.