Mountain View, California — In a surprising show of embellishing its cash-cow, search engine giant Google is introducing some new geographical targeting options and tweaking others within AdWords for 11 countries, including making the switch to Nielsen DMAs for US metro areas and releasing postal code targeting for Canada.
According to a post on Google Adwords site yesterday, the recent change comes as the company unleashed the city-level targeting and location extensions to new countries. And here in the United States, Google mentions that it has recently changed its metro targeting areas to Nielsen DMA (Designated Market Areas) regions.
For instance, in the US, the change means goodbye to metro area targeting and hello to designated marketing area (DMA) targeting, a means of describing media markets trademarked by Nielsen. The switch means marketers advertising both online and on television will be able to reach the same people, if they target the same DMA on both media.
According to the company, describing the effects of this change said, “Now your online campaigns and reporting will more precisely match TV-based audience data and campaigns. If you have been using metros, you will notice that the new geographic shapes look different on a map,” says product manager Derek Coatney, on the Inside AdWords blog. “While you might see some increases or decreases in traffic with the new regions, we estimate the impact will be small for most advertisers.”
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“Today, advertisers in Canada, the US and 9 other countries have even better local targeting options with AdWords.”
In Canada, Google is presenting the ability to target by Canadian Postal Code FSAs, the first three digits of the postal code, which conforms to a certain geographic area. (FSA stands for forward sortation area.) This change, is similar to expanding its launch of ZIP code targeting, which was already available in the U.S. Advertisers can now reach over 1,500 of them.
“As always, if your business has a determined service radius and you want to more tightly target a campaign to that area, we recommend using the radius targeting option to identify and select specific cities and postal codes to reach.”
For Canada “you can now reach over 1,500 Canadian Postal Code FSAs, the first three digits of the Canadian Postal Code.”
The company further said, “Now you will be able to plan, buy and get reporting with AdWords the same way you do with direct mail. In addition, with the “Bulk locations” tab in the AdWords location targeting tool, you will be able to easily enter up to 1,000 locations per country at a time.”
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In some other parts of the world, Google is appending more city and regional targeting capabilities to the nine new countries. These comprises of: Belgium (city), Bulgaria (region & city), Denmark (city), India (city), Ireland (city), Romania (region & city), Sweden (region & city), Taiwan (city), and Vietnam (city).
Besides, location extensions, which lets advertisers to show their nearest location and phone number along with a search ad, will now be available in six new countries — Belgium, Denmark, Ireland, India, Sweden, and Taiwan.
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With these additions, the company said, “That brings our full list of countries with city level targeting up to 43.”