Google Regional Targeting, Not So Regional?

[narsticle]

I have been running some local campaigns on Google lately and finding that some of the traffic is not so regional thats coming in. I have been targeting a 45-60 mile radius and finding that I am getting leads well outside that area.

Is anyone else finding the same thing going on with their locally targeted adwords campaigns?

[edited by: eWhisper at 4:25 pm (utc) on Nov. 20, 2006]
[edit reason] Please no blog links. See TOS. [/edit]

[jtara]

Geolocation is best for locating users to a continent or country, and even there it does not always work.

It's really not reasonable to expect it to work well at the local level. Particularly for rural users, who are likely to be using dial-up to access connections in a nearby or not-so-nearby city. At best, these users will be geolocated to the city.

And despite their flurry of giving away stuff for free, I don't know how successful Google has been at getting a large percentage of their users to open accounts and stay logged-in so that they can be geolocated by their own declaration of location. I know that I make a point to log-out after using a Google service.

(This is partly Google's own fault - for requiring multiple accounts for multiple roles - rather than adopting "single sign-on". They made everybody get Google accounts, instead of Adwords, etc. accounts - but now you need multiple Google accounts!)

To the extent that Google markets the ability to restrict viewing to a narrow area - well, they are marketing a fantasy.

[starboy]

I've been running a campaign locally targeted to Los Angeles for over a year. By ads regularly appear on the East Coast.

So much for local targeting.

[RonnieG]

AdWords geo-targeting targets the location of the IP addresses issued to the user's ISP, or whatever ISP the user is connecting through at the moment, and dynamically leased/loaned to the user while they are connected, and not necessarily the user. Three years ago, one of my site's logs were reporting 40% of all traffic from Virginia - AOL's home base. Another 10% from Washington (MSN?), and 10% from California (NetZero? Other?), and only 20% from everywhere else.

[narsticle]

Interesting discussion.

Google sure touts their regional targeting abilities and is targeting an assault on the local ad market. To do so they are going to have to do a better job then this with the targeting.

[suzyvirtual]

Also, google serves searches when the geotargetted location is included in the keywords. so, if you are advertising on the keyword widgets, in st. louis, your ad will come up on searches on the keyword "widgets st. louis"

[adrianTNT]

I wanted US traffic and I see users from Africa, well done Google.

edit: African visitors are coming from googleSyndication url, so is adwords that sends them.

[edited by: adrianTNT at 5:52 pm (utc) on Nov. 24, 2006]

[sem4u]

I target a campaign to the state of California and it seems to work very well. Very few enquiries from outside of the state at all.