ConversionR

Yesterday, Dave Davis from Redfly Marketing posted an article on Adwords geotargeting. In his piece, he explained the benefits of targeting all the specific locations within a single country instead of just selecting the country. He states that by selecting the specific locations, an additional line will be added to the ad with the mention of the location targeted, and that it should increase the CTR and improve the Quality Score.

I agree with him, but I think that there is another aspect that helps the CTR as well in the situation he describes. It is not only that your ads will have an extra line, it is also that they won’t be displayed to the same searchers. In most of the cases, the tactic suggested by Dave will reduce the number of useless impressions.

Why is that ? Let me explain.

Many advertisers using Adwords think that geotargeting a country means that their ads will be displayed exclusively to searchers in that country. Sorry to be a kill-joy but that’s not the case. If you geotarget France for example, searchers based in France are only 1 of 3 groups of people who will see your ads. (I chose France because it is the example given by Google in its documentation).

The three groups are:

• Searchers with an French IP. (That’s the obvious one)
• Searchers using a regional terms linked to France in their search queries.
• And finally searchers using Google.fr anywhere in the world. (That last case is the crucial one to understand)

There are no less than 2 millions French people living outside of France and they are very likely to use google.fr. Most of the people I know have never changed  their homepage. If their homepage is Google.fr on the laptop they brought with them to London, Brussels or Sydney, they’ll keep using it again and again.

And do you think they’ll click on an ad for a French e-commerce website? Probably not. Each time the ads of a local business are displayed to these expats, the CTR on the ad is very low. And if by miracle, there is a click, it’ll be almost impossible to get a conversion (if a French person living in New-York types “iPod”, he might browse a French site selling them but he will certainly not buy it from a site shipping from France as it would be more expensive than buying it from an American retailer).

If you are an advertiser who targets the UK market, keep in mind that there are over 5 millions British people living outside the UK. Each time they use Google.co.uk, your ads could be served to them even if you geotarget the UK.

The good news is that by using the geotargeting tactic described by Dave (selecting all the locations within a country instead of the country), you ads wont be displayed anymore to searchers located outside the selected country but still using the Google domain for that country. In addition to the extra line with the location in the ads, I believe this explains why selecting all the locations within a country should increase your  CTR and improve your Quality Score.