Being There for Your Customers

Geo-targeting, Part II

Geo-targeting in the new Sponsored Search is a feature that can deliver improved ad performance for any advertiser, from the largest national brand to the smallest local “mom-and-pop” shop. By deliberately managing geography in the design and implementation of an online advertising campaign, advertisers gain a significant measure of control over their campaigns that can be used in a surprising number of ways.

Using geo-targeting is easy
Geo-targeting is applied at the campaign level, and the first step in setting up any campaign is choosing the regions to target. The default choice is to target the entire market, but you can also chose to target by State (or by province in Canada) or by City & Surrounding Area.

In the United States these City & Surrounding Area regions are actually “Designated Market Areas”, or “DMAs”—media markets determined by Nielsen Media Research Inc. and commonly used by advertising professionals to manage integrated advertising campaigns. The new Sponsored Search provides several useful tools to help you select the states, provinces or DMAs that you want, and provides maps that show the areas being targeted. Once you’ve set up geo-targeting for a campaign all ad groups and ads within your campaign are subject to the chosen geo-targeting constraints. Reporting of campaign results is available broken down by the regions that have been geo-targeted. 

Different strokes
Different types of advertisers can use geo-targeting in different ways.

Large national brands can use geo-targeting to customize their advertising message for different regions or to align their online advertising with their regional marketing organizations, perhaps in support of local stores or offices.

Large advertisers can also use geo-targeting to test different messages in different regions or cities, or to include an online component to a narrowly targeted offline campaign. Advertisers with sufficient expertise to develop customized tools for managing their campaigns have access to a web-based Application Programmer Interface (API) that provides full geo-targeting functionality.

Advertisers in regulated industries such as insurance or banking can use geo-targeting to ensure that they don’t advertise in regions where it is prohibited by law.

Small advertisers will also find geo-targeting to be extremely useful—especially advertisers who only service specific local areas. For these advertisers geo-targeting at the “Designated Market Area” level is generally most appropriate, possibly combined with the use of geo-modified keywords to specify small areas within the DMA region. By using geo-targeting in the new Sponsored Search local advertisers can now fully avail of all of search advertising opportunities available to national advertisers.

Geo-targeting is simple to understand, easy to apply and useful to advertisers of all sizes and in all industries. It can be used in many different ways, for many different purposes, and gives all advertisers a far deeper level of control over their advertising.

—David Caswell, Senior Product Manager, Global Geotargeting