Local Targeting with Pay Per Click Ads

[garyp]

Local Targeting with Pay Per Click Ads
Source: ISEDB
http://www.isedb.com/news/article/970

In Many cases, creating a successful Ad Campaign requires a look at the competitor's ads. If you are targeting specific countries outside of your own, in many cases it is either near impossible, or extremely difficult to view the competition - until now

After you perform your search in Google, go up to the address bar and at the end of the URL add the text 'gl=uk'; (or instead of uk, any applicable country code), hit enter and you will now see a listing of AdWords ads that are targeted towards the UK.

[AussieWebmaster]

Good trick... will be using that today to see how many of my competitors are pushing into Asia.

[flyingrose]

You might also try using the Google Adsense Preview Tool. See https://www.google.com/adsense/previewtool. After right clicking on any page including a search page in Google you can view ads that would display on that page by country. That option is under "Choose Options".

[rickydeez]

We do a lot of advertising in specific cities/counties and would need to check the local competition.

Does anyone know a way to view the local city/county advertisers?

[AussieWebmaster]

We do a lot of advertising in specific cities/counties and would need to check the local competition.

Does anyone know a way to view the local city/county advertisers? If they are smart they are also advertising national for the general terms with the local reference added in a phrase match.

[rickydeez]

True, but i've noticed a lot of local advertising companies aren't that smart... and often times ad campaigns will vary from local - national levels.

No one has any ideas?

[ElizabethReynolds]

Ricky, I ran into trouble checking on my South/Latin American campaign listings in every country i list in (I think i have 15). Without specialized ad monitoring software, I just booked marked www.google.com.ar, www.google.com.bo, www.google.com.br, etc.

Time consuming :( , but until i find a 'kosher' program to monitor everything and not violate TOS with Google, that's how i do it!

[conciseusa]

My wife owns a Chinese restaurant that delivers so I thought I would set up an AdWords campaign at Google to get leads for her web site that has a delivery menu.

I had no idea it would take almost a week of full time work to get to the bottom of how to set up a local ad campaign on AdWords. I think I finally have things working and I will share the highlights of what I have learned in case someone else wants to give them a try.

After reading the setup info and setting up the campaign, the first thing I found was the Google Locations service was worthless. Maybe it is just the ISPs I use, but not a single ad would come through until I set the campaign to "Global or nationwide-United States". Once the ads started coming through, I started testing the "broad match" logic. Unfortunately, the broad match logic was not very intelligent. For example, if I set up a keyword in AdWords "Chinese delivery TUSTIN" and then went to Google and searched on "Chinese delivery TUSTIN, CA" or "Chinese delivery TUSTIN CA", no ad would show up. I know the phrase was in AdWords because "Chinese delivery TUSTIN" would trigger an ad to display. Why Google does not trigger on "Chinese delivery TUSTIN CA" when all the words in the AdWords phrase are present in the query is a mystery to me.

At this point I realized I would need to create keyword phrases for every keyword + location I would want to trigger an ad. I entered in to a mild state of depression thinking of the monotonous task of building such a list, and became suicidal at the thought of maintaining this list. Routine tasks like expanding or reducing the radius of the target area and changing the base keywords would be very time consuming. After a bit of thinking I determined it would be justified to spend a few days coding a system that would accept a US zip code, an area radius, and keyword list and then build a list containing all possible combinations of cities/zip codes with the entered keyword list.

I coded the system in PHP/MySQL and I have placed it on a public page for others to use and comment on. The URL to the page is http://5minutesite.com/gen_keywrds.php. So far things seem to be working well. I set the zip code, a radius of 2 miles, entered 16 keyword phrases I thought people might search on and a few nearby neighborhood names. The resulting combined list contained 240 items. I loaded this list into AdWords and now I am getting ad triggers that I am happy with. If I expanded the area radius to 10 miles, an area many service companies cover, the resulting list contains 2,512 items; a number of items that would be next to impossible to maintain manually. I am sure I still have a lot to learn about how to manage a local AdWords campaign, but at least now I have a tool that makes it easy to test new scenarios.

[seobook]

cool tool. A few things that would make the tool cooler are:

* allow people to enter multiple words to make up more phrases based on those various words (like GoogEdit or ThePermutator do)
* allow output to match various match types (like broad, phrase, & exact)
* allow people to create "location + keyword" and "keyword + location"
* optional format the output to allow people to enter max bids and let the search terms drive the URL.

[conciseusa]

I will need to learn more to consider how to make such changes:

* allow people to enter multiple words to make up more phrases based on those various words (like GoogEdit or ThePermutator do)
- I have never heard of these, will need to learn about them. Are they free open source, or do I need to buy them?

* allow output to match various match types (like broad, phrase, & exact)
- would this mean adding a option that will allow enclosing phrases in "" and [] ?

* allow people to create "location + keyword" and "keyword + location"
I thought the order of words do not matter in broad mode. I still have a lot to learn about PPC systems. I will need to do some testing and see if this is needed

* optional format the output to allow people to enter max bids and let the search terms drive the URL.
- I am not sure how those options work. Will need more information.

Thanks for the feedback. Once I learn some more maybe I can add some features.

[seobook]

>* allow people to enter multiple words to make up more phrases based on those various words (like GoogEdit or ThePermutator do)
- I have never heard of these, will need to learn about them. Are they free open source, or do I need to buy them?

GoogEdit is free
http://www.googedit.com/2/edit-adsense-word-lists-easily-with-googedit/
I think ThePermutator costs about $50

>* allow output to match various match types (like broad, phrase, & exact)
- would this mean adding a option that will allow enclosing phrases in "" and [] ?

yes :)

>* allow people to create "location + keyword" and "keyword + location"
I thought the order of words do not matter in broad mode. I still have a lot to learn about PPC systems. I will need to do some testing and see if this is needed

well it may not matter in some systems. it may matter in some. exact match would certainly matter.

>* optional format the output to allow people to enter max bids and let the search terms drive the URL.
- I am not sure how those options work. Will need more information.

like when you bid on a term it could look like

[local keyword generator] ** 0.25 ** http://www.yoursite.com/?src=adwords+keyword=[local keyword generator]

or something like that. Google gives examples of how to post specific URLs & bid prices in the AdWords system.

[conciseusa]

This one required about an hour of programming so I added it to the system:

* allow output to match various match types (like broad, phrase, & exact)
- would this mean adding a option that will allow enclosing phrases in "" and [] ?

I have added Prefix & Suffix fields that allow you to wrap the results with any text you like.

Let me know if that does the trick :)