If you want to Geotarget one ore more cities or metro areas the only way to get all or most of that cities traffic is to use "Opt Out" targeting. "Opt Out" targeting is when you target a local area and the entire state while excluding out everything in that state except the area you want to target.
For some reason a lot of people don't seem to notice this and even some argue it is not true. I have personally seen it in action and can say for certain it is true.
I have a very old campaign that has been running for many years that targeted Texas as a whole. I made some changes that increased our spend way too much but had great results. I found that the vast majority of our business was coming form 3 metro areas. I have always had Texas selected and last year I added the major cities in Texas. This way I could watch average position in each city and use bid modifiers to make sure my average bid was the same in each city.
Now that I knew I could spend all my money in those cities and pay a much lower CPA and get more business I decided the rest of TX needed to go. I removed TX and every other city other than my top 3. The next day my traffic tanked. When I compared my traffic from those 3 cities from the past my traffic had gone down 90% when it should have not gone down at all. The account should have gone down about 35% not 90%. I could understand a few percentage or even 10% but not that much.
I called Google and went on the Adwords community forum. Nobody could seem to understand what I was saying. I then found an article that mentioned that Marta Turek had spoken about this at SMX in 2013. I was so glad I was not the only one who knew about this.
I switched to Opt Out by adding Texas back in and then excluding out everything but the areas I wanted. (that was a pain). A week later I realized that I still wanted the TX traffic I just did not want to pay much for it. I then removed all the excludes and set the state with a negative bid modifier. Both ways brought my 3 main cities traffic back to previous levels. The exclusion method still brought in a very tiny amount of traffic throughout the state. The reduced bid method brought a lot more traffic at a much lower CPC and did not affect the average position very much. It only reduced my average position by 1.
My account is on steroids compared to what it was before all this.
