If you’ve spent any time at all in the settings part of your AdWords campaign, you’ll have seen that Google offers a location targeting tool. By default, Google runs your ads everywhere in your chosen country, to everyone, across its Search and Content networks.

That’s fine, to a point - but what if you don’t, or can’t sell to everyone, everywhere?

If you’re selling a book, a CD, a set of golf clubs or some consumer product online, you might want to advertise everywhere. But in one campaign? Perhaps not. And if your service or product is most often supplied in person - let’s say hairdressing, construction, car repairs, plumbing, new or used cars, houses - whatever, you’d be well advised to target people local to you, particularly with a smaller budget.

You should first know how location targeting works:

1. Google predetermines a searcher’s location through their IP address. Most of us have a unique one, assigned by our ISP. And again *most* IP addresses are geographic in nature, meaning that rather like a telephone number, it identifies which country or town you are in. This is true for the majority of IP addresses. However, a minority of users’ IP addresses do not accurately reflect their location. The result is that your ads could be displayed to a user outside of your chosen location(s). In all fairness, this is an IP address issue, not Google’s problem.
2. Google also uses the location you have selected to include the place names as keywords. Let’s say that you’re targeting the Birmingham area, and 50 miles around. Google decides that your bid on the keyword ‘pest control’ is more relevant to someone searching for ‘birmingham pest control’ than a competitor targeting the entire country, as indeed would a search for ‘walsall pest control’, or ‘dudley pest control’.

Just how granular these location-matches are is unclear. For example, it is possible to choose a town to target, but not all towns are available in the list: London, of course, is fine, but what about Guildford? Or Mansfield? Or Marlow? And how about Richmond - that is in the list, but means Yorkshire, not South West London (and they don’t tell you that unless you ask, by the way).

So, for a service provider, you might want to use the option of a radius of your location. Start with a larger radius, monitor your budget usage each day and reduce the radius until your budget lasts the whole day. I know that you might quite happily sell your service to a market beyond this and agree that it seems odd to not advertise to that audience. But unless you’re going to increase your budget to capture all those clicks all day, you’re better off concentrating on clicks that have the best chance of ‘converting‘ to a sale, picking up the phone or actually becoming a customer - and those are the people that are closest to you.

Selling country-wide or internationally, you should still use location targeting. Split your campaign(s) - target each for a chosen location. Perhaps there’s a slightly different message for people in different locations - no point in telling people in Ireland or Canada that there’s “FREE UK NEXT DAY DELIVERY!” - why do they care? Even if that doesn’t put them off clicking your ad, you’re wasting valuable space for a more compelling message.

Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, splitting your campaigns will mean that you’ll be much more able to measure how the campaigns are performing. Here’s an example.

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Given the cost of the conversion, if we’d spent that £689.89 budget on the UK instead, we’d have made 252 sales - nearly twice those made in Canada, and double the profit.

If a cost of £5.38 per sale is fine (and I’m sure it is for most businesses!), you’re still better off knowing where your budget is working hardest for you and where your successes and failures are coming from. The tools are at your disposal - use them to your advantage.

So, to summarise: with careful keyword selection and location targeting, you can easily create a message that compels each specific audience. The keyword ‘magazine printing’ might get your ad lots of impressions, but targeting 30 miles of Birmingham with the keyword ‘cheap magazine printing’ means that you’ll know a whole lot more about that searcher before they even see your ad, right? In your ad, tell them you’re in Birmingham and tell them your prices are keen, too - they’ll be much more likely to click your ad, and more likely to land you a sale for the cost of a few clicks.

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