The whole point of spending money with Google Ads is to get your ads in front of the right people. Yet, many ads are missing out on doing that by not using word-of-mouth as a factor. In this blog, we show you how you can.
Back to basics: what is location targeting?
Adding location targets to your campaign in Google Ads means that your ads will only be served to people in, regularly in or regularly searching for results in a particular location.
If you’re looking to attract customers who work in London,
This means that, for example, someone who commutes to work in central London could receive ads targeted at their workplace both at work and at home, due to their association with the work location.
There are many reasons why targeting by location can improve efficiency and ROI of Google Ad campaigns; we find the three most common are:
Accessibility – targeting ads to the areas where a product or service is available.
For example, a company may only ship a product within a particular country. Or a brick and mortar shop may only advertise to people near enough to visit.
Proxy demographics – targeting ads to locations based on what is there.
Such as, a company with a product aimed at students may focus on cities with a university. While a company selling to tech businesses may target cities with a high number of tech companies.
Copy targeting – targeting ads with copy that focuses on a particular location.
Ads containing location-specific copy, e.g. “We’re helping people in Bristol with their finances…”, can be really effective, but only for those in that location.
How can word-of-mouth help Google Ads targeting?
As with anything in marketing, without data you’re walking blind. As much as marketing is very much an art, it’s also very much a science
It’s hard because knowing what locations to choose is hard. Without data, it’s akin to throwing a dart at a board
Which locations can you target?
Google Ads enables a wide range of location targeting options with different levels of specificity. These can be split into two categories:
1 | Named locations
For the UK, the highest level is the whole country, useful for goods and services that are only distributed here. For many people, this option is used without even considering it as location targeting.
Beneath that, there are named locations, such as cities. Then, there are also landmarks, such as airports, around which you can target users.
Finally, you can target using one or many of the circa 2,000 outward postcodes in the UK – only the first bit, such as BN1.
2 | Proximity targets
These allow you to target a circle of radius as small as 1km around any point in the UK. When potential customers are in that area and run a search that expresses interest in your product sector, Google will serve them your ad.
How does the GDlabs platform use it?
GDlabs recommendations are often for areas smaller than the smallest proximity targets allowed by Google. As a consequence, we built our system that takes a collection of recommended areas and selects the best combination of:
- Allowable proximity targets
- Minimising the area outside the original recommendations
- Ensuring all of the recommendations are covered.
