AdWords regional targeting accuracy

[travisk]

I target advertising to several local "regions" in my AdWords campaigns. Does anyone know how reliable the ip-based regional targeting is in Adwords? Google says that they can determine the correct country 99% of the time. What about local regions accross the US? What percentage of local users am I missing if I only run localized campaigns? How many ads am I serving incorrectly due to proxies, corporate networks, incorrect location information, etc.? The online help does not provide an answer.

[poster_boy]

I've noticed a dramatic difference between targeting all regions in a country vs. the entire country. For me, traffic was approx. 25% higher when targeting via the latter.

[travisk]

Thank you, that is very interesting. Does anyone have an "official" answer?

[brycen]

I'm not having so much luck with the regional targetting. I have two ISPs for myself: when I look at a random IP address database one comes up as Virginia (I'm in California). The other does not come up at all.

I get similar quality results with Google. So: what percentage of potential regional traffic do I forego when I select regional targetting?

[edited by: eWhisper at 12:04 am (utc) on Feb. 6, 2005]
[edit reason] Please No URLs Drops Tos [webmasterworld.com] [/edit]

[anallawalla]

Yes, a lot of people use the VA based ISP and I will also confirm that many IP addresses do not resolve to a particular country, never mind region. One set given to my ISP hasn't been detected as Australia for over six months and when I see Bay Area ads, I know I have one of those addresses that day.

The rest of the time (most of the time), regional targeting does work if you are trying to reach only that region, but you will still miss users who use national ISPs. You would hope that Google and Overture are talking to such ISPs and sell them on the merit of allocating local IP addresses.

[brycen]

I don't use "THE" Virginia ISP. I use "A" regional bell operating company's DSL service. Yet location is still not right.