Geotargeting: Do your ads accurately reflect your service area?

Determining where you want to have your ads show is, surprisingly, often neglected. We often times see when conducting our AdWords account audit and strategy sessions, or when beginning work with a new client that geographic targeting is set up incorrectly. This is primarily due to new Google AdWords campaigns automatically adding Canada as a target country.

If your product or service is not available in Canada, be sure to remove it from your geo-targeting list once your campaign is uploaded.

Now, moving beyond this quick tip, there are a number of slightly more advanced geographic targeting features that are very helpful for advertisers.

In order to focus on specific cities, states, regions, etc you must select which campaign you would like to work on.

Using the new AdWords interface, select a campaign and then at the top of the page select the "edit" link found next to targeting.

On the following screen you will see a link underneath the "Locations, Languages, and Demographics" section that says edit beside locations:

Upon clicking on this link you will be brought to the "Select a Location" screen. Here you can determine your geographic targeting in 4 different ways:

• Search: simply type various cities, states, countries, etc that you would like to target.


• Browse: here you can browse every country that your ad could potentially be served in - it's a longer list than you can believe!


• Bundles: here you can select sizable regions for targeting. For example: all of Latin America or all of Western Europe, etc.


• Custom: this is the feature we primarily use. The most notable feature here is the ability to create a custom area to target by placing multiple pinpoints wherever you want.

Be sure to target the areas that your product or service is available; it's a simple, yet common, mistake we see.