Are any of you advertising local, offline (no online sales) businesses? I've been playing with adwords for my business, which is a locally-targeted service. My website explains what I do and offers contact information, but I'm not actually selling products there.
I'm just curious if anyone has tips for making this work well for something other than affiliate or ecommerce businesses.
Is the geotargeting worthwhile? I'd guess that it would reduce my impressions, but maybe increase my CTR since the impressions would be better targeted. However, having worked pretty intimately with some other systems that use IP-to-location matching, my confidence in the accuracy is pretty low. I'd rather have a few poorly-targeted impressions in the mix than lose out on users of national ISPs, for example. I could also envision situations where people from outside the area are intentionally looking for service providers here. I'd hate to lose the chance to reach them because of geotargeting. So, how does this work for you in practice?
Sounds like a need for prominent use of a toll free line and a lead generation form to me.
I'm also really curious about how the geotargeting seems to impact things for people with local businesses.
I too am struggling to advertise very local operations, where even the regional targetting is too big.
1. AdWords. You'll want two campaigns. One for geographical targeting where you can specify just the keyword products. The second will be shown nationally, but you'll add qualified terms to all the products (Detroit dentist, Detroit cosmetic surgeon, etc).
AdWords has several geo targeting options.
The 'metro' option usually covers a city fairly well, however, it will ignore the suburbs in many cases.
Radius targeting - if you live in the burbs, often the ISPs are downtown, and Google misses a lot of the locals.
Longitude/Latitude targeting. This is useful if you want to target half of a state or country. If you have a lot of rural visitors, it can be useful for reaching these areas that aren't covered by the metro targeting. In most cases, this tool is more fun to play with over actual use.
If you're a business with a very specific geo customer basis, then you'll want to use the radius or metro option. However, if you have a decent conversion rate and there isn't a lot of competition for your keywords, then going ahead and specifying a a larger area can work in your favor as the bottom line is dollars. You'll reach some unqualified visitors - however, you'll also reach more qualified visitors who weren't in your original targeting area.
If you're a medium size business where people will drive a ways to reach you, you'll want to use the radius targeting, and list the radius a bit larger than the metro area (often 50 miles is pretty decent).
2. Overture. You can do the same thing here. The general keywords will go into an Overture Local account, the geo qualified terms will go into a precision match account.
3. IYPs. Don't undervalue IYPs. Some of them show up in the SERPs for various keyword phrases (which is why you want to investigate categories before you pick yours), and their traffic converts very well.
There are, of course, more options such as the business profiles on Yahoo, local portals, etc. You should be able to find out more information on these products in the Local Search Forum [webmasterworld.com]
I did the "customized" location, setting it to 50 miles around an address downtown (I'd rather center it in the middle of the city than my actual location; I travel around the area). If I search for one of the keywords in the Ads Diagnostic Tool, whether I enter a national or regional location (using my metro area), it says "we are unable to identify the user's geographic location" and doesn't serve the ad. Is that based solely on the location info I enter in the tool, or is it really using my IP to try to locate me? If it's the former, that's troubling -- the radius I defined starts smack dab in the middle of the metro area, so the ad should clearly be shown when I set the location in the tool to that region. Even if it's the latter, it's a little frustrating -- the IP I'm coming from belongs to a local company with a large block of IPs directly assigned to it (in other words, determining the location from that IP should be easy, and it's very near the center of the radius I defined).
When I search on it in the normal Google search, my ad doesn't come up either. But several of my competitors' ads do come up, which leads me to believe that at least some geo-targeting is happening. I doubt that so many of my local competitors would be the top bidders for those keywords on a national level. So, despite the diagnostic tool's claim that it's unable to identify my location (and the lack of my ad), somehow it's figuring out where I am well enough to show my competitors' ads. Sigh.
To see a geo ad, sometimes this works. Add your geo targeted area to the search query. (i.e. New York City Widgets).
If you're using both techniques (i.e. a national campaign that's bidding on 'new york widgets' and a campaign targeted to NY and bidding on 'widgets') you need to set your regional bids higher than your national bids.
Google doesn't use a hierarcy system of: if local > show local, if no local > show national. Your keywords will compete with each other on similiar terms.
By using the max bids to control your exposure, you're forcing Google to show your regional ads by manipulating the Ad Rank formula.
I did geo targeting for my area "Toronto", but it turns out that all the DSL users who subscribe to the main "phone company based" ISP (as apposed to "cable based"), appear to be connecting from an ip based in Ottawa. Therefore, none of these users see my localized ad.
