Be Careful When Geo-Targeting Your Local AdWords Campaigns

Watch out. You may think that you have your AdWords campaign targeted to a specific region, but Google may still showing your ads all over the place. How can this be? Google explains it in the AdWords Help under the How does AdWords know where to show my keyword-targeted ads? section. Here, I’ll save you you a click. What it says is,

We analyze the actual search term the user submits on Google to determine when to show ads targeted to a specific region or city. If someone enters a search query that contains a recognizable city or region, we may show appropriate regional or custom-targeted ads. For example, if someone searches for ‘New York plumbers,’ we may show relevant ads targeted to New York, regardless of the user’s physical location.

One of my clients was surprised when, after doing an initial audit of their AdWords campaign, I told them that their Ads were showing up when I searched Google from Los Angeles for “Atlanta kickboxing class“, especially since they had limited the target area to a 10 mile radius from their location. When I took a look at the client’s Google Analytics account I saw that they had in fact at one time or another in the past three months, paid for clicks from Miami Florida to NYC, and from Hollywood California to Bellevue, Washington.

Now, for some businesses, this might be the right thing to do, but for many, this could be a big problem, especially for local businesses with small territories and limited ad budgets. What if you sold Chicago style pizza in New York? Or New York Style Pizza in Chicago! Attempting to restrict your ads to show only in your home city would be impossible to do, at least on some level.

It should be noted that this does not happen on the country/territory level or the global/regional level. You will never see an ad targeted to Sweden while searching Google from the USA, or any Canadian ads for that matter.

But for micro-targeted ad campaigns, you aren’t getting laser precision. It gets even messier when you start looking at ads running on mobile devices. Google has a whole hierarchy that it follows to determine which ads to show to a mobile searcher. But they admit that “query parsed location always takes precedence in determining which location to be used for serving ads on iPhones and other mobile devices with full Internet browsers.” but if there is no locality in the search phrase, Google is going to work with what its got, and in the worst case, that mean looking at a user’s previous searches.

As far as a solution goes, one thing you could do if you really only want to target a specific town, would be to target the whole country and then exclude all the surrounding states and cities but the one you want to target. I’m not 100% sure that would work either based on what Google said about query parsed location. Its is just an idea. I’ll let you all know what my results are after I test it out. If anyone else has another solution, please post your ideas in the comments section below.