Simon Turner

Get your PPC Geo Targeting right

I was just doing a quick search for Christmas gift inspiration when I came across an example of how NOT to run your PPC campaigns. See if you can spot the ad that really shouldn’t be targeting the UK:

(Note the image link may take you to updated results not including the bad ad!)

In case the image is too small, it’s an advert for a US site displaying in the UK results. It’s got $ instead of £’s in the ad text, and if you click through the site is clearly US only .

This is a disaster for a paid search campaign for the following reasons:

1) As the ad text states the price in $’s it will have a poor CTR in the UK. This will bring down the quality score making each click more expensive.

2) People from the UK either can’t buy from the site, or shipping will be expensive. This will give the ad a terrible conversion rate and thereby a poor ROI.

3) Money spent on clicks in the UK will drain the budget which would be best spent targeting the U.S market.

It’s such a simple issue to avoid – just be sure to select only relevant geographical areas in your campaign settings. If you’re a local business you can really narrow it down and select only the area you are likely to sell too. So a plumber is Sheffield could bid on the keyword ‘emergency plumber’, but only display when somebody in Sheffield has performed the search.