Posts Tagged ‘keyword targeting’

We were asked to look into some variations to a client’s PPC campaign this week. After logging in to the campaign and seeing what options we had, I was impressed to notice that Google Adwords allowed me to restrict ads to be shown within a specific town or city within the UK. You could even set a radius of a certain amount of miles for your ads to be shown in, which is really helpful for advertisers who want to attract local business only.

I began to think about exactly how this could be enforced though.  It has to be through IP address I thought, so looking through Google’s help section I found the following explanantion:

When possible, we determine the user’s physical region based upon the Internet Protocol (IP) address. This applies to regionally- or custom-targeted ads and to any ads that are displayed on Google.co.uk.

Regional and custom-targeted ads: If someone searches for plumbers from a New York area IP address, we may display ads targeted to New York, even though New York was not in the search query.

Ads that show on Google.com: Unlike country-specific Google domains (such as Google.fr), we consider a user’s IP address for ads that show on Google.com. For example, if a user with an Australian IP address visits Google.com, we will display ads targeted to Australia, even though the user is not accessing Google.com.au.

All very clever. For a full explanation of how Adwords knows where to show keyword-targeted ads, see here.

I’ll take a wild guess that a lot of people don’t know about this! It’s a great way to stop unwanted clicks from areas you don’t / can’t serve, and it could drastically reduce your PPC spend, and increase your campaign effectivenesss.

All our clients on PPC are UK wide so no real savings for them, but it’s useful to know that it can be restricted so ad revenue wastage doesn’t occur as often.