Location Targeting HACKS for Google Adwords in 2018

There are lots of parts to a small business Google AdWords campaign.

• Keywords to target
• Bids and Budgets
• Ads and Landing Pages

One of the pieces that are often overlooked is your location targeting. Choosing the right locations in your local area to target for your campaign can make a HUGE difference in how effective your local business Google AdWords campaigns are.

In this post, you’ll learn

• The best way to target locations in AdWords to MAXIMIZE results (it’s not by town or city)
• The three types of campaigns you need to have to ensure your ad shows to ALL prospects

Let’s look at some Google AdWords Location Hacks!

Best Way To Target Locations In AdWords

Almost every small business Adwords account we’ve looked at is set up to target a specific city or town. Below is a screenshot of the specific town or city targeting.

At a glance, this makes perfect sense. Target the cities and towns that surround your business, but there’s one flaw. Not everyone in those cities and towns is as likely to do business with you as everyone else.

The more segmented you can make things in Google AdWords the better because then you can see what is working and what isn’t.

How can you segment locations?

By targeting postal codes and zip codes rather than specific cities and towns.

Above you see that this campaign is targeting specific postal codes rather than the one town that contains all these postal codes.

Notice how the B3L postal code gets the majority of the impressions and the clicks. You’re better able to see

1. What parts of town are most searching for your services
2. What parts of town are most converting to purchase your products & services
3. What parts of town you should stop spending AdWords budget on targeting

It takes a bit of time, but eventually, you start to see what postal or zip codes never convert to calls or leads, so you can stop spending money targeting those areas.

If you only target the entire city or town, you can’t as easily see that granular view of who’s clicking and converting.

Take away here is to target by postal or zip code not city or town names.

Use Three Types of Campaigns for Location Targeting

With all of our Google AdWords Small Business clients, we manage we use a three-tier approach to their Google AdWords location targeting.

1. We Target the immediate zip or postal codes around their business
2. We target all of the post or zip codes in their city but exclude the specific postal codes in the first campaign
3. We target the entire province or state and exclude the postal codes from campaign #1 and campaign #2

The video below gives a detailed explanation of why we set up these 3 campaigns this way.

The basic idea is in campaign #1 you target only the postal or zip codes that are immediately around your business. These are the best prospects for your products and services.

In this first campaign, you can target geo-specific keywords. So if you were a chiropractor, for example, you could target “chiropractor your city” but you could also test running an ad for words like “Chiropractor” and “chiropractor near me”.

You know that the people seeing those ads for this campaign live or are currently located within those immediate postal or zip codes around your business.

The second campaign you want to target the postal and zip codes throughout your city but exclude those you are targeting in the first campaign.

The keywords you want to target here are geo-specific to your suburb or area in town. So you do not want to target the generic “Chiropractor” keyword. Instead, you want to focus on “chiropractor your city” and “Chiropractor your suburb”.

The third and final campaign you want to target the entire province or state and exclude all of the postal codes you are targeting in campaign one and two above.

For keywords, you again only want to target those that have geographic identifiers with them as with campaign #2.

The video above explains it very well, so take 5 minutes and watch that also.

Want to see how we set up a Google AdWords campaign for a local business from start to beginning, and then what we do each month to ensure we’re getting great ROI for our clients? Grab our free demo video and price guide here.

The video will show you how we gauge the potential for your specific industry and city, how we gather the keywords we’re going to target and then how we manage your Google AdWords account to ensure you’re getting a great return on your ad spend.