Tracking Google Geotargeted AdWords?

IF you do not live in the targeted area - Proxies?

[lorenbaker]

IF I live in Maryland and am running a Google Geotargeted AdWords campaign to Madison, Indiana or Albequerque, New Mexico - how can I see those ads for my own tracking/auditing purposes?

Sure, I can IM somebody in those areas and ask if they can see them or even twist their arm to send me a screen shot. BUT, I was thinking that if I had a regionally targeted IP proxy server account (so it looks like I'm logging in from Indiana and not Maryland) this could be done.

I've found lists of country proxy servers, but nothing state to state... any suggestions?

[pmkpmk]

Yes, proxies is the answer to this. I usually use them to masquerade on a country-level, so finding proxies for this is easier.

For a state-by-state level, you have to do a little more work. Just find a list of free proxies (fairly easy to find on the web) and then do a

nslookup

for the IP address. Try to find a university proxy since they give you the city or state in the resolved hostname.

If nslookup does not resolve the hostname, a whois or traceroute can help as well.

[Jenstar]

You can also do the search in question, then use the AdSense preview tool to right click the results page - then you can check the ads for the various geolocations. However, it won't go down to a regional level (ie. you can choose US but you cannot choose New York) so you would still need a proxy to get down to the county/regionl level.

[google.com...]

[pmkpmk]

Hi,

just yesterday I learned about the "GL" parameter in the URL.

If you have a search-URL, try adding "&gl=xx" where xx stands for the IANA code of the country. For example "&gl=es" would give you Spain. Combined with the "&hl=xx" parameter for the language, you can trim down AdWord results very neatly.

Still, there are differencies. For example

http://www.google.com/search?q=flatscreen&hl=de&gl=de

is NOT the same as

http://www.google.de/search?q=flatscreen

but comes close enough. Hope that helps.

P.S. I personally stick to Proxies - the proxy switcher in Firebird works just fine...

[ztalk112]

I thought that when geo-targeting was first introduced that you could simply include the location in the search query, Google would return relevant geo-targeted ads?

My understanding was always that Google would look at the query first (before the searcher's IP addy) to determine if there was a local intent.

After all, Google absolutely wants to show locally targeted ads to people researching holiday destinations from outside the target area for example.