Sometimes it seems as if your Google Adwords budget can never be large enough to reach your target market or customer. There are ever changing factors involved in the bidding process such as, new competitors entering the market, a surge in demand for a product, seasonality of a product, etc. One important concern is how to maximize your online ad spend to reach its potential. Geo-targeting is extremely important and often overlooked.

If there is tracking software on your website, such as Google Analytics, you will be able to determine where the good quality and poor quality traffic is originating.

Geo-Targeting Campaigns at a Smaller Level

When looking at your analytics program it is important to notice where your sales or your set “goals” are performing in reference to geographic areas. This data will either show you where you need to cut back, increase, exclude, or consolidate ad spend.

Below is a 30-day snapshot of paid search traffic on Google Analytics’ Map Overlay feature at the city level, sorted by the number of visitors, for a sample client.

Looking at this table you can notice right away that New York City does not have any transactions from this particular account. This may or may not be a cause of concern depending on your business location, structure, etc. If it is a concern, consider excluding the New York metro area from your paid search campaigns to avoid spending your budget on a location that is not converting.

On the other hand, if you are receiving many orders and customers purchasing from your store located in New York, you may want to consider excluding New York City from your other campaigns and create a New York geo-targeted campaign and allocate a separate budget to this campaign.  This will enable you to better control how much you are willing to spend in this particular area and possibly pull back on other, lower converting areas.

Below is the same snapshot of paid search traffics on Google Analytics’ Map Overlay feature at the city level, sorted by the total amount of revenue.

In this situation if we had more data over a larger period of time, we could use this information to increase ad spend in areas where the average visitor is making larger purchases than the average sale on the website.

Below is the same snapshot of paid search traffic on Google Analytics’ Map Overlay feature at the city level, sorted by the total amount of transactions.

In this scenario you may want to give Syracuse, New York its own campaign. This would enable you to perform a test with a separate budget. Even though the average values of the transactions are low, you may be able to receive a high volume of transactions.

These are only a few examples of how to geo-target your ad spends to use your budget efficiently. Always remember, each aspect of a campaign, especially the ad copy to the geo-targeted location, is extremely important to kick off any successful paid search campaign.

After clicking on an ad that I’m interested in, the first thing I do is look for the keyword I searched for. When I land on a page and the product I’m looking for or the form I wish to complete is not right in front of me, I will most likely click back and bounce off the page to click on someone else’s ad.

As soon as you get a searcher on your site, you want to catch their immediate attention with a strong message and call to action. You can do this in many ways. If it’s a particular product they searched for send the traffic to that product page. The user could be a quick buyer and immediately go on to checkout.

Now say that you are a company whose online goal is to cultivate a lead. The faster the form is presented to the searcher, the greater the chance that they will complete it. If a searcher must look for your Contact Us tab to fill out a lead form, you should invest in a designated landing page for lead form. This way you can send your traffic here and your lead forms signups should increase. This can only happen when you give your searchers an immediate and relevant call to action.

About a year ago (March 2009), I wrote a blog about the increasing trend of people purchasing “Smart Phones” and how that can impact local advertisers.  The statistics were staggering with regard to the sheer volume of people using their cell phone to browse the internet and complete search queries.  At the time of my blog article “More than one out of every six American homes (17.5%) had only wireless telephones during the first half of 2008, an increase of 1.7 percentage points since the second half of 2007. In addition, more than one out of every eight American homes (13.3%) received all or almost all calls on wireless telephones despite having a landline telephone in the home.”, according to the report from CDC’s Department of Health and Human Services.

In addition, according to a recent comScore report at the time of my March 2009 blog, “the number of people using their mobile device to access news and information on the Internet more than doubled from January 2008 to January 2009.  Among the audience of 63.2 million people who accessed news and information on their mobile devices in January 2009, 22.4 million (35 percent) did so daily; more than double the size of the audience last year.”

Well, it seems the trend is continuing upward.  Google Search was the top mobile property in December 2009, with nearly 28 million unique visitors, followed by Yahoo Mail, at 23.2 million, and Facebook, with 18.8 million.  Rounding out the top five were Gmail, with monthly traffic of 17.6 million, and Weather Channel, at 13.8 million, according to recent research from The Nielsen Company.

Given these large numbers, as a business owner, are you comfortable with what people see when they visit your site from a mobile device?  If you’ve looked at your site recently using a smart phone or other mobile device (unless you already have a mobile website) odds are you will not be pleased.  Regular websites, no matter how great they look, when viewed from a PC do not look the same when viewed from a mobile device.  In fact, some devices (even the smart ones) cannot read websites unless the website is created specifically for mobile visitors.  I own a Palm Treo Pro, and it has the capability to view any website with its built in browser, but I can tell you its almost impossible to navigate (or get any information) from sites that are not “mobile ready”.  The amount of text and images that take up the screen is so large that by the time I scroll vertically or horizontally, the page needs to reload and by then my patience is worn out.

Think about this as you plan out your marketing strategy for 2010.  With increasing numbers, people are using their cell phones to access the internet and visit websites.  Be sure you include in your marketing plan to account for these visitors and provide them with a user-friendly and accessible version of your website.