One thing that small businesses and large enterprises have in common is that their online advertising campaign budget needs to be stretched to the max and generate the best ROI.
Whether you have a handful of key products and/or services with a three figure monthly budget, or you have hundreds of products with a six figure budget, geo-targeting can make your campaign work even harder.
Geo-targeting within Google has become more precise, in terms of how granular you can be when targeting locations, as well as becoming easier than ever to use!
While most people will have already refined their targeting by country, and possibly by city, there are some other methods which can be used to experiment with; by reviewing the CTRs and CPAs of a campaign over a set time frame.
Campaign Splitting
Splitting campaigns into locations is a great method to best target visitors for service and offline based organisations . By splitting campaigns you can not only geo-target specific cities but you can also adapt the keywords targeted; taking into consideration accents and cultural differences. You can also adapt ad text to mention the specific locations, making your service feel more local and desirable. You can also test ad text in different areas to see what appeals more, or less, to classes and cultures.
Use your GA stats
Make the most of the data collected in Google Analytics and look for demographic trends which can be replicated in your AdWords campaign. Take a broad date range of all-traffic data and look at the top performing locations for either visits and/or conversions. If you have a tight budget, start by targeting the top goal generators, then gradually expand out to other converting locations. You can take this approach at a general business level or even look at category and/or product level targeting, ensuring you target the most relevant audiences without wasting budget.
Use other research
If your GA data is limited, use other sources of data and information to help target the most relevant audience. For instance, if you sell high-end, luxury products, try targeting the wealthiest regions in the country - the Telegraph has a great Top 50 wealthiest cities article based on property prices! This strategy can also be applied to a range of products and audience stereotypes, for example, reach out to students by geo-targeting the biggest student towns and cities in the country! Manchester has 5 university campuses taking over 100,000 students each year!
With these easy-to-apply, strategies in mind, try experimenting with your geo-targeting and see if you can boost your ROI over the next couple of months!
