Adwords - Unbelievable Clicks

Why bother with the settings

[PCInk]

So I set my adverts to people in the UK only.

Google shopping picks up every day from my site, a new fresh feed.

This product has been discontinued since January.

Today I watched my real time statistic on Analytics.

10% of my clicks on a discontinued product. One click from New York.

Since when was New York in the UK? Why haven't they dropped a discontinued product?

They were awful to me when my feed didn't match my website for just a few minutes.

Well, Google, if you want to actually charge for clicks outside the bounds of your customers requests, I'm done with you.

Seriously, check your clicks. You could be due a large refund.

[buckworks]

Geo-targeting is never 100% accurate. AdWords' accuracy is pretty good, seems to be in the high nineties, but never 100%.

That said, there might be another issue here, in that your location settings weren't as tightly targeted as you thought.

Check the location settings for your campaigns, specifically "Location options (advanced)"

That setting will default to "Target People in, searching for, or viewing pages about my targeted location"

If that's how your campaign is set, a person doing geographically specific searches such as "UK widgets" or "widget dealers in London" might be shown your ad even if they're outside the UK.

If that's not what you want, you need to change the advanced location setting to "People in my targeted location." Then for sure your ad would only be shown within the UK ... subject to the not-quite-100% limitations mentioned above.

As for the shopping feed, have the discontinued items actually been unpublished? Or are you just assuming they drop out of the feed?

[aristotle]

That setting will default to "Target People in, searching for, or viewing pages about my targeted location"

That happened to me too when I started. It never occurred to me that they would make that kind of distinction. It's an as***** trick they pull to get more money from you.

[PCInk]

I changed that setting a few years back when I noticed a huge jump in the number of fraudulent orders from Nigeria. They'd changed my setting without letting me know. I complained and got a refund for all international clicks.

How do I unpublish a product? Do they not drop products when a new feed is uploaded with the same file name if the product is no longer in there?

It is not in the feed. Also, I can't find it in the merchant center so can't remove it from there either!

[RedBar]

Since when was New York in the UK?

Just so you know there is a New York in Lincolnshire quite near to Boston and also one in Tyne and Wear!

There's also a California in Norfolk.

[PCInk]

This one was definately the Big Apple New York.

I've started uploading out of stock/discontinued items to the merchant center with "Out of Stock" as the availability. Apparently, they won't show these products for PPC. If you don't do this, the products are still searchable for 14 days.

Hopefully this will make a difference but I don't like being so out of control with the advertising as Google Shopping is. It is difficult to see what search terms are being used, the merchant center isn't great and everything operates so slow on their site that I'm surprised they haven't issued a penalty to their own sites in their serps!