Geo-Targeting AdWords
To improve tracking and save on a cost per click basis, I separated one of my campaigns into countries where English is the main language. I used Adwords editor to carbon copy each campaign from the main one and everything were kept the same except for the target area. The countries all seemed to fare well when grouped in one campaign but when separated, the numbers returned to me were disturbing. I realized that the countries expected to outperform did so-so and very poorly, ROI wise. I would have never known this if I didn’t test on a regional basis. The ratio of ROI was 4: 2.5: 1 where the best campaign did 4 times better than the worst.
Optimize Your Account For ROI, Not Clicks!
Another note is that my CTR was highest at the region that converted the lowest. I’m going to study this further and see why some countries did better than others. I had an entire week to collect data and will now dissect the Google reports. At least my quality score increased from the higher CTR.
The lesson I learned is to never assume anything with PPC advertising.
Great post Giovanna. I currently have a client’s non-US PPC ad groups bundled together, so I have no idea which countries are converting better than others. I will definitely separate them out soon.
Maybe in a future post, I’d love to see which countries you found to outperform the others.
06.29.08 at 4:53 pm
I don’t do much marketing in others countries. Most of the time it’s more regional based in the United States. I have had a question about PPC for a will that might sound a little ridicules. I have one campaign that is for The United States. And another that’s for my local area. The national campaign has cities and states for keywords such as this:
“Wichita ks real estate”
“Wichita Kansas real estate”
The geo campaign is more general like this”
Real estate
homes for sale
If someone did a search within my local area for “real estate”, what ad would show up? The local, national or both. I don’t think both?
I’m glad to hear you started a blog about all of this, and can’t wait to read all the post.
Best of luck,
~Dustin
06.30.08 at 4:08 pm
Yes only one ad will show up, especially if they share the same domain name. The geo-targeted campaign with a broader key phrase has an advantage over the national campaign with longer tail keywords.
07.01.08 at 6:36 am
At least if you want to be benefited from setting different Max CPCs to your keywords in different countries and save costs, this is the right approach.
07.25.08 at 11:36 am
I believe that the higher bidding ad of the two (when geo-targeting overlaps) will be the one that appears. Or perhaps the one with the higher CTR and Quality Score.
But it also depends on your keyword settings in the ad campaign. Broad match (no qoutes) vs. pharse match (with quotes) vs. exact match (with brackets).
07.27.08 at 7:17 pm