Adwords Locations

Clicks coming in from outside selected location

[JillJ]

We have a stats program on our server to verify incoming traffic. We have an AdWords campaign that we selected to show only to United States. This campaign is linked to a page on our site that is not linked elsewhere so we could gauge the actual traffic coming in from AdWords. We are seeing things like Ghana, Mexico, India and more. Also a concentrated amount of clicks coming in from the same area in Texas. I have had a conversation with AdWords customer service but they told me we are not receiving any traffic from those ads outside of the US. I asked if there was a way to see where the hits were coming in from but apparently only they can see this information? I'm sure there's an explanation but things are not matching up from what I can tell. Anyone else experience this? Advice?

[TheRealSaxman]

JillJ, do you have your ad targeting set up to only allow "People In My Targeted Location"? If you have it set up for "People In, Searching For, or Viewing Pages about my targeted location" then people outside your targeted area can see your ads if they use identifying terms in their query. You say that you are targeting the United States... let's say that you sell "widgets"...if someone in India searches for "Widgets For Sale In Texas (Florida, California or any other State or City in the US)" then your ad will show to them, unless you have them setup as a specifically Excluded Area. You can address this in your campaign Settings. As far as seeing where the visits are coming from I can't believe that Google said they couldn't show you how to do this? If you link your Adwords account with your Google Analytics account you can easily see this data by segmenting out your data to only show "Google / CPC" data and then go to the Geo-Targeting section of analytics. This will show you a map of where your paid traffic from Google is coming from.

Hope this helps,
Saxman-

[JillJ]

Thanks for the info Saxman!