When setting up a Google Ads campaign, one of the central decisions you’ll need to make is who to target and how you actually target them. Google do provide a fair amount of control, however if you use the wrong settings, you’ll end up showing your ads to people who weren’t interested in the first place.
Take the following into consideration when trying to target the right people:
Different time zones.
If you’re targeting multiple countries around the world and you only wish to display your ads between 9:00 AM to 6:00 PM, you might run into some issues. This can be accomplished, however you’re campaign configuration is vital.
Ad scheduling is based on your account’s time zone and not the visitors time zone. When you initially set up your Google Ads account, you set a time zone that can only be changed once.
If your account’s time zone was set for Chicago and you wanted to target all of the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia, you’ll need to setup multiple campaigns in order to accomplish this. If you were to target all those countries within one campaign, your ads would only be displayed during 9:00 AM to 6:00 PM within Chicago, missing out on those working hours in the United Kingdom, Australia as well as the other time zones across the United States.
Be careful, you might be over bidding.
When targeting multiple locations, you’ll soon find out that not all locations need the same bids. In some cases, you might see that you’re overpaying for traffic from a particular location.
With the introduction of Enhanced Campaigns, you’re now able to set a bid adjustment per targeted location. Let’s say you want to bid 10% more on traffic from the United States and -10% less on traffic from the United Kingdom. In the past, you would need separate campaigns in order to accomplish this. Now this can be done within one campaign.
Why is your entire budget being dominated by one or two locations?
Setting bid adjustments per location can be useful at times but I still wouldn’t recommend that you proceed with merging all your geo targeted campaigns into one single campaign. If you’re regularly limited by your daily budget, you may have noticed a situation where one or a few targeted locations dominate your entire budget leaving nothing behind for the other locations that you wish to target. The only way to stop this from happening is to split groups of locations into separate campaigns that each have their own dedicated budgets.
What about people outside of the targeted area that are interested in what I’m offering?
When deciding which locations to target, you’ve probably started off with people in your area of service or where you have historically seen sales. That’s fine for a starting point but you might be missing out on people who want what you’re offering but happen to be outside your targeted area.
Take the following as an example, let’s say you have a restaurant in New York city and you were to only target people within a 20 mile radius. There are plenty of people within that targeted zone, however you could miss out on all the people that are located around the world who happen to be visiting New York city in the near future. Obviously, you don’t want to target a general term such as restaurant across the entire planet. That would probably burn through your budget rather quickly.
Depending on how you configured your campaigns, Google will show your ads to people based on the following campaign level setting:
- People in, searching for, or viewing pages about my targeted location (default)
- People in my targeted location
- People searching for or viewing pages about my targeted location
In the past, Google would show ads based on the visitors IP address. It’s not a perfect system but the IP address can in some cases demonstrate where a person is located. A little over a year ago, Google introduced a smarter system of search intent. With search intent, Google interpret the actual search in order to pull out location based information regardless of where they are actually located.
If you weren’t aware of this setting, you’ll most likely be using the first option which includes search intent as well as IP address based targeting.
Search intent is great but it also needs to be used with caution. Here is another blog post that dives deeper into the issues that can arise when using search intent.
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