How to target your pay-per-click campaign to specific parts of the world
If you run a business that offers international shipping, or if you sell a downloadable product, you might want to target a pay-per-click campaign to absolutely anyone in the world who searches for your keywords. On the other hand, if you sell real estate, your typical clients will come from the same areas you sell your property in, and quite probably even from farther afield, including other states or countries. In any case, you most likely have a well-defined set of geographical areas that you want to target (or should be targeting) with your estate agency’s pay-per-click campaign.
Google AdWords language and location targeting
With Google AdWords language and location targeting, you can control who will see your PPC ads based on their geographic location, their language settings in Google, or a combination of both. Google can also compare the place names people include in their search with your chosen locations to determine whether to show your ads or not.
Note that AdWords language and location targeting does not translate your ads, but simply determines who will see them. This means that if, for example, you run your pay-per-click advertising with English ads in a country where this language is not widely understood, you will most likely get a low click-through rate on your ads or even low-quality clicks. Ideally, you should create a separate AdWords campaign for each country/language you target, with matching ads and landing pages.
How it works
The AdWords Language Targeting is quite simple and allows you to select one or more of over 40 languages your audience could be using. If you chose to target the Spanish language, your ads will show only to people whose Google interface language is set to Spanish, no matter where they are in the world.
The Location Targeting options give you far more control over the exact geographic location where your PPC ads will show. You can target your ads by
- country
- region or city (not available in all countries)
- Entering a physical address and a radius from that address (currently US and Canada only)
- Drawing a circle or a polygon shape of the area you want on an interactive map.
When a search is made, Google uses a number of methods to determine where the user is searching from and matches that with the locations you targeted to decide if your ad should be displayed.
You can read more about language and location targeting in the Google AdWords learning centre.
Combining language and location targeting with keyword matching options
When we discussed how to choose pay-per-click keywords, we advised against using very broad search terms such as ‘property for sale’. The exception to this is when you are running a pay-per-click campaign that is highly targeted to the location you operate in.
For example, if you target your campaign only to London, using the broad keyword ‘house for sale’ (as opposed to ‘house for sale in London’) could work well. This is because Google will only show your ads to people searching from London or who have included the names of London-related places in their search query. Still, you will have to use the right keyword matching options, and/or make good use of negative keywords to make sure that people in London searching for ‘Bristol house for sale’ do not get to see your ad for London property.