Geotargeting With Ppc Options

[eKstreme]

Suppose you're selling something that has regional distribution channels (say stuff from amazon.com or .co.uk or .de). To display the right affiliate link, you need to geotarget. So here is the question: do you let Google or Yahoo! do the geotargeting for you or do you geotarget yourself?

Does your landing page do the geotargeting or is it better to let the PPC network do the targeting?

My view is that if the landing page has only one block that's geotargeted, it's better to do it on the page itself. Otherwise, if you're sprinkling geographical names (like USA, Australia, Germany), then it's better to have a different copy for each geographical target and let the PPC network do the targeting.

What do you think?

Pierre

[phaithful]

Well I haven't done much international geotargeting... mostly US stuff... and the problems I run into when doing on-page geo is some people are coming through large ISPs that aren't always in the same city or even state that the user is coming from.

For example AOL's IP is largely in Virginia and many of their users are all over the country but their IP resolves to Virginia.

Since I don't have a list of known ISP IPs it's difficult for me to serve the general (non geo) content... this is where I rely on the PPC provider to do the targeting.

They can keep up with the IP lists much more easily than I can. So I typically just defer to them.

This post has been edited by phaithful: Mar 1 2007, 08:03 PM

[Tom Anthony]

Good question.

A couple of points -- I don't trust Google or anyone to do precise geotargetting. Country, yes. City, maybe in the US. Anything else, not really.

So that would advocate, similarly to you, letting Google/Yahoo do the geotargetting to country level.

Then to back this up (and this may be wrong, I've never been in the situation), it occurs to me that some countries will be less competitive for certain keywords than others; you may not be so fussed about bidding for a higher position. Can anyone confirm this?

[eKstreme]

Thanks for the replies!

AOL's IPs are typically indiscernible. Maxmind have a good FAQ relating to their database:

We break down AOL addresses on a country level between United States, Great Britain, France, Germany, Japan, Australia and Brazil. Some French AOL users appear to come from Great Britain or Germany due to the way that AOL routes their traffic through proxy servers. Canadian AOL users will appear to come from the United States. It is not possible to target AOL users on a state level, due to the way that AOL routes traffic from multiple states through the same IP address.

Always trust AOL to be the odd one out

The other thing about geotargeting is language. If you're selling in (say) Germany or France, would you have an English sales copy? Would you have an English ad?

Questions, questions

Pierre

[infonote]

Manual is always better. It however depends on time constraints. If you have no time go with the automatic method

[apogee]

Hi Pierre,

Have you trying running 2 campaigns to try to reach your local audience? I find this tactic of running a national campaign but with geographic keywords and then a local campaign without the geo keywords works pretty well. See this page from the Learning Center to see what I mean:

http://www.google.com/adwords/learningcent...9167.html#19172

The national campaign helps capture those users on a national ISP and also users who, for example, might have a long commute and search at work for things they need at home. IOW, both campaigns are local. One is local by virtue of the keyword selection and the other is local based on the geo settings. Here's an example of fictional campaigns for a bank in Columbia, Maryland, USA:

Campaign 1: Region and City
Location Targeting: Columbia, MD
Keywords:
bank
banks
banking
savings account
checking account
free checking

Campaign 2: National
Location Targeting: United States
Keywords:
columbia md bank
columbia maryland bank
columbia md banks
columbia maryland banks
howard county bank
howard county banks

HTH

[rynert]

The problem I have is non-UK companies deciding they want to show thier non-UK adverts on my UK-only site via Adwords, and there is seemingly nothing I can do about it.