Question for seasoned AdWords Advertisers

Effective Country Selection

[dmerton]

For those of you using adwords to promote a content driven site, or a site that earns money on clicks rather than sales (adsense for example) do you run your ads in all countries? some countries? most countries? Are there any countries that you stay away from? Any smaller ones that you have found to produce suprisingly well?
Thanks, -dan

[1Lit]

Best to target your product to countries by doing research on them. The more affluent the country, generally the more likely that people will have credit cards and buy online.

Sales in some countries are extremely poor for products that can be pirated. To give you an example, read a report recently that 90% of software in countries like Spain and Italy are pirate (latest version of Microsoft software sold openly on the streets for a few Euros) so you have to be careful if trying to sell software to such countries.

[dmerton]

Thanks 1Lit, makes sense, more affulent, more likely to buy online. What if you only care about clicks though? Does the quality of traffic tend to vary depending on the country, or do you find that traffic/clicks from Google users in say South Africa, or Peru for example are less like to spend time on your site and eventually click thru?

[PatrickDeese]

> What if you only care about clicks though?

Well - obviously someone else has to care about conversions - otherwise you will have no ads showing - and if you bid 5 cents to show in Nigeria, for example - you just might be the only bidder for that geographic region.

Your question cannot really be answered because if you have a site about, say - big ticket consumer electronics - you won't get US based companies (with US level prices) bidding on their terms in countries where shipping might cost the same as the product itself.