How to Make Geotargeting Part of Your PPC Campaign

It can be easy to forget, but there’s a person on the other end of that Google search result and that person has a physical location. And if you’re running PPC advertising campaigns, that location could be the key to unlocking a new level of advertising performance. You can reach potential customers where they are—quite literally—through the power of a tool known as geotargeting.

You might have heard that word before, but what does it mean? It’s a useful feature, built into most major PPC advertising platforms such as Google and Facebook, that allows advertisers to target their ads to people within a certain geographic area.

How does this technology work and how are advertisers applying it? It’s actually incredibly easy, thanks to its integration with PPC platforms and, best of all, it’s free. Here’s a quick primer on what it is, how to use it and how to get the most out of it.

The Basics of Geotargeting

As you probably know, Google, Facebook, Instagram and others are such great advertising platforms because of how much data their users share through them. Location is one of those data points, which is why Googling “grocery stores” will get you completely different results depending on where you do it. You don’t even have to add the “near me” qualifier, as many people do. The location targeting is automatic unless a user turns it off. It is important to audit your PPC traffic regularly in order to ensure that you are reaching the right audience that is most likely to convert.

These platforms put their location data to work for PPC advertisers by offering geotargeting—the ability to choose the geographic locations in which the platform will serve your ads. You might target your ads to anyone in the United States, anyone in Illinois, anyone in Chicago or even anyone in neighborhoods near downtown. On top of that, you can use it for all kinds of useful functions like varying ad copy by location and adding targeted locations in bulk, depending on what platform you’re using.

Why Geotargeting Works

With PPC advertising more competitive than ever, smart targeting is vital—and geotargeting is a robust tool for making your targeting smarter. When combined with other demographic targeting tools, it can provide many useful benefits for advertisers:

• It shows customers ads that are more likely to be relevant to them (the ultimate goal of any targeted advertising strategy).
• It helps local businesses start and maintain customer relationships.
• It gives advertisers new ways to segment their markets creatively, such as running exclusive coupons for certain markets.
• Through exclusions, it keeps your ads from showing in places where you don’t want them to show (think Alaska or other places with prohibitively expensive shipping).

These are some pretty hefty benefits. So, which businesses are poised to take advantage of them the most easily?

Which Businesses Get the Most Out of Geotargeting?

At the most basic level, the businesses that stand to benefit the most from geotargeting are companies that rely on local sales. This can include, but isn’t limited to:

• Restaurants (both dine-in and delivery)
• Bars, nightclubs and event venues
• Brick-and-mortar retail
• Contractor services such as plumbing and pest control
• Professional services such as lawyers

Local geotargeting can offer a serious boost to these businesses by driving local traffic. However, all kinds of advertisers can use geotargeting to employ agile and responsive PPC strategies, even on a national level. Online retailers, wholesalers and even enterprise sales businesses can all benefit from employing geotargeting.

How Can You Get Started with Geotargeting?

PPC ad platforms like Google Ads and Facebook all offer geotargeting as a standard option for your ads. You can use the detailed tutorials available from Google Ads and Facebook Ads to get started, and you’ll quickly discover that the tools are both remarkably simple and incredibly powerful. Personalizing a PPC campaign can increase effectiveness of your audience targeting.

To effectively introduce geotargeting into your ad campaigns, you’ll want to plan out some specifics beforehand, including:

• Whether you want to target countries, states, ZIP codes or a radius
• Whether you want to include everyone there or only residents, visitors or recent visitors
• Which demographics you want to target (Facebook Ads’ Custom Audience and Lookalike Audience are great tools for this)
• Which keywords you want to bid on and which ads you want to run in which locations

If you’re planning on running coupons for specific locations, you should make sure that they’re ready to go on your website and that your customer-facing infrastructure (such as fulfillment) is ready to serve those locations. It can also be effective to give your copy a slight regional spin, not to mention a little bit fun.

Optimizing Your Ad Return Through Geotargeting

Possibly the most useful feature of geotargeting is that, once you’re familiar with the tools, your business will have a wide range of new advertising strategies available. Some of those strategies include:

• One useful trick to try is a sort of “reverse geotargeting.” Use the Google Ads tool suite to access the geographic and location data from your Google Ads clicks and see where they’re coming from. You can use that data to find places where people are interested in your products and services. Then, you can use geotargeting to reach them directly.
• Local businesses can use geotargeting to synergize PPC ad buys with other local institutions and events. Google Ads’ geotargeting allows you to target in hyper-granular detail, all the way down to a specific range around a specific address. That means that you can target the hotel district with restaurant coupons for out-of-towners, send students at the college campus back-to-school specials and much more. 
• You can use geotargeting to take advantage of changes of season and weather. Is another polar vortex in the forecast for the Midwest? Run geotargeted ads for winter gear and emergency supplies in Chicago, Milwaukee and Detroit. Selling winter vacations in Florida? Target upper-income residents of colder states in the months right before winter.
• Remember that you may not need extensive geotargeting on every platform. Google Ads, for example, might not be the right platform for a nightclub to run geotargeted ads for its drink specials. But why not try Instagram or another socially-focused platform?

These strategies only scratch the surface of what’s possible with geotargeting. Once you’re comfortable with the tools, it can be easy and fun to find new and creative ways to use it for market segmentation.

Geotargeting your PPC presence by regions, states and neighborhoods can be an effective strategy for local and national businesses alike. In our age of digital anonymity and online selves, it’s not always who you are but where you are—and knowing where your customers are can give you insights and tools that you never even realized were there.

Contributed by: Ronald Dod, CMO And Cofounder of Visiture

Ronald Dod is the Chief Marketing Officer and Co-founder of Visiture, an end-to-end eCommerce marketing agency focused on helping online merchants acquire more customers through the use of search engines, social media platforms, marketplaces, and their online storefronts. His passion is helping leading brands use data to make more effective decisions in order to drive new traffic and conversions.

Website: www.visiture.com

LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/ronalddod

Twitter: @Visiture_Search

Facebook: @visituresearchmarketing