Why is it that most advertisers don't exclude countries that they don't sell to, from their campaigns. It drives up costs at both ends. If I'm selling something like insurance or mutual funds in my country I have to outbid webmasters from across the world which is ridiculous. We're affecting our interests adversely while making Google and many other web sites richer. You'll find stock market related message boards focussed only on Indian stocks carrying ads for Dow Jones and NASDAQ. Such advertising would mean a near zero ROI for the advertiser. I'm sure Google would rather get richer while giving its advertisers some good ROI. What makes most webmasters throw away so much money or am I missing something here?
The default when placing an ad for a U.S. advertiser is a U.S.-targeted ad. I would assume this is similar (perhaps regional, though?) in other parts of the world.
I think the problem is more likely that IP-address based geolocation is an inexact science.
Google may not know that your ISP's IP addresses are associated with India.
In some cases, ISPs or companies may have their own private connections to the Internet that terminate in the U.S. Or, U.S.-based international corporations or ISPs make use blocks of IP addresses for their foreign operations. Google would think that these are in the U.S.
It's just a horrible, inexact technology that is taking educated (but not TOO educated) guesses.
In fact, there is some provision in the DNS system for specifying location, but it's seldom used, and so would be even less reliable than IP-block based guessing.
Sometimes its really obvious and seems to happen with clickbank products in particular, the US results show a US specific product with a well written ad bid into the blue against stiff competition by an experienced affiliate; in the UK a different affiliate is promoting the same product at a low cpc and with a poorly written ad, wasting his money. That affiliate wont be making his fortune anytime soon.
One time, on hearing that I was from the UK, a guy asked me 'Gee, Do they have McDonalds in the UK?'
I tottaly agree with you.
On the other hand, itīs also true, and Iīve personally observed many cases like this, Iīve seem many Adwords SEM who are not quite familiar with the usage of Adwords, and up to this day, they still donīt know they can target Ad appearance by countries, locally, etc.
Best Regards,
Ishvec.
Not to mention that insurance or mutual fund firms are largely offline firms who have made the leap to online marketing & are still finding their way.
The default setting when I upload keywords is "All Countries"
I don't quite understand this. There is no country setting required to upload keywords. This setting is part of the campaign settings.
What country are you in? This defaults to "U.S. only" for me. I am in the U.S. I would have to change the setting from the default to select "All Countries".
Since you mentioned "upload", perhaps you are using some software to access Adwords (not the web interface?) and perhaps this has different default settings.
The default for these uploads, for me, is "All Countries."
