Changing my ads to show in certain cities increased CTR by 400-600%

Wow!

[brizad]

One of my campaigns has a product that theoretically might be searched for all over the country, but in reality, the primary market is about 9 metro areas.

For the past year I've run the ads over the whole country and had pretty decent CTRs. Then with the recent AW changes the CTRs started to drop a lot which of course led to lower placement and higher costs.

So a few days ago I changed the ads to only show in the metro areas of the primary markets. Granted it's only been a few days but I'm seeing increased CTRs of 400-600% which is awesome.

Don't ask me why I didn't do this before. It just never dawned on me that it would make that big of a difference!

But on a sad note, *conversions* are still about 200% lower than last year but I'm seeing that in all campaigns. Adwords just doesn't convert like it used to :-(

[limitup]

That's cool, but how does your click and conversion volume compare to when showing it nationwide? Are you getting a lot less clicks and/or conversions?

[bwelford]

That's a fascinating approach. I have Adwords runnning only in a local area and the impressions are somewhat low. I've decided to go national for certain periods of time in prime time on Monday to Friday to see how that compares.