I’m running a PPC campaign for a new product. During the rollout of the campaign we came across a problem with the Geo-targeting of ads in Google Adwords.
Because we’re a credit union based in BC (and operationally are bound by a charter that limits our selling area to this region) we set our Google Adwords campaign to display only to searchers in CANADA > BRITISH COLUMBIA.
We had someone indicate that they couldn’t see our Adwords ad when they searched for one of our key phrases. Google’s interface was indicating we were gettting impressions and click-thru for this keyword and their ad diagnostic tool indicated that our ad was being shown for that keyword in our geo-targeted market — so we were a bit perplexed.
In the end, to test things out I fired up my laptop and did a search on Google myself. Sure enough, no ad appeared (though I could get our ad to appear if I searched for something like “term deposits british columbia” from the same computer).
 
So I spent some time in Google Adwords and on e-mail back-and-forth with Adword support and discovered the problem.
Google’s targeting relies on it being able to determine the users IP address. I, like the user who was unable to see the ad, was connected to the internet via a wireless connection. Google couldn’t interpret the IP address coming from my wireless, so it reported a “null’ value, and thus our geo-targeted ad was not shown even though the person and ISP was located in B.C.
Given the ever-growing use of wireless connections in the home and at work for internet connectivity, it seems like a potential for significant traffic loss when running PPC ads that are geo-targeted and a big advantage for internet marketers who sell nationally and don’t need to geo-target their ads.
- Has anyone else run into this before? The folks at SEOmoz have and wrote an interesting article on it.
- If so, how have you addressed this problem with your geo-targeted campaigns? Google suggestion has been to create a regionally targeted campaign with general ad text and keywords as well as a country targeted campaign with region specific ad text
One reply on “Are your geo-targeted PPC ads being seen?”
[…] Scott Baldwin. Scott, like Jason, is another great analytics guy. He has a deep understanding of how any Internet marketing strategy will affect the big scope of things, and is able to tie it all together nicely. My only wish is that he would have more time to blog! My favorite post on his blog: Are Your Geo-Targeted PPC Ads Being Seen? […]