Set up geo-targeting in your Google AdWords campaign

Target your pay-per-click ad campaign to the geographic location of your customer base.

Recently, I met with a client to talk about their Google AdWords campaign. They have a series of ads that are targeted to different states where they do business. A different ad for each state. Every ad went to a landing page for the state. So far, so good. The problem was that ads for states other than the one there were located in were showing up in search results. For example, a Connecticut ad was showing up in Massachusetts search results. That’s not good!

We logged into their Google AdWords campaign and the problem was identified pretty quickly. They had placed all of their state specific ads into a single campaign. Geo-targeting is set at the campaign level. So, if you target a specific state for your campaign, it will affect all of the ads in that campaign. If you target Massachusetts, for example, all the ads in the campaign will be served in Massachusetts, regardless of the text that appears in your ad (such as “services in Connecticut”).

This is an easy fix, just create a separate campaign for each location your are targeting. Then, set up your locations within each campaign.

I hope this little tip helps you avoid hours of frustration in managing your Google AdWords campaign.