Wondering if Snapchat is worth your time? Well, on any given day, Snapchat reaches 100 million+ people, which includes over 41% of all 18 to 34 year olds in the United States. The mobile platform has evolved into a “must-download” app with any new phone purchase or upgrade. Luckily for brands, the platform has opened the doors to paid advertising with On-Demand Geofilters.
Google recently announced a few changes to its location targeting capabilities for AdWords ads. Location targeting, or geo-targeting, allows advertisers to select specific locations for their ads to be shown and find the right customers. Location targeting can be done by country, areas or states within a country or even a radius around a location.
The search engine has deprecated location targeting by custom shape targeting, which previously allowed advertisers to create multi-point targeting on geography maps. As of September 15th, all custom shapes were deleted and if no change was made to the campaign, leaving no location targets, the campaign was automatically paused. It is recommended that advertisers delete custom shape targets and update the location targets.
In addition, Google recently changed their U.S. metro targeting areas to Nielsen DMA (Designated Market Areas) regions to more precisely match TV-based audience data and campaigns. Google says this update will have a small impact for most advertisers as there will only be slight increases or decreases in traffic in the new regions.
The third change to location targeting within Google AdWords is fitting for an election year as Google has enabled a solution to allow political campaigns to reach voters within a specific Congressional District. All AdWords campaigns that have congressional district location targeting enabled — search, display, mobile and video — are shown solely within the selected district’s boundary lines.
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.
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