Since Jacob wrote a post on Geotargeting and his search for an engagement ring (congratulations again Jacob and Jenn), and I’m going to be on a panel at SES-Local in November, talking about “The Best Practices for Using PPC for Local Targeting“, I thought I should write a little more on this topic from a slightly different perspective.

As Jacob said, geotargeting is a great tool, when used correctly for a number of reasons:

1. It stops you from competing against the national brands and bigger players, which means a lower cost per click.
2. You’re only targeting people in the area you want to be targeting. If you’re a bricks and mortar store in Baltimore, you don’t want to have people in Tampa clicking on your site, spending your money and lowering your conversion rate.
3. When the search engine makes a point to differentiate those ads that are geotargeted, by stating the geotargeted area directly below the ad, that reinforces the local aspect of the ad, and makes them much more clickable.
4. It can help users find a local business that they didn’t know existed.

So what’s different about a locally targeted campaign? Well, you might think that instead of running a national campaign with “Baltimore Brown Widgets” you could locally target “Brown Widgets” to Baltimore, and everything would be great. While there is some truth to that, what I’ve seen is that locally targeting “Baltimore Brown Widgets” to Baltimore along with “Brown Widgets” will get you better results. Why is this? Well, while the engines geotarget automatically for paid listings, people tend to look for the organic listings, and so they lengthen the search query by adding the location modifier in there.

Another big difference is the keyword set that you’ll use from market to market. While you’re most likely aware that in some locations it’s soda, in others pop, etc, there are going to be differences in search behavior by geographic demographics. Search behavior is not the same from location to location. In one market the top search term may be plumbers, in another Tattooing (you can see a sample of data comparing 4 different markets here). Understanding those regional variations is key for you to succeed in a particular market.

What about for a national company? Is there a need to locally target? Possibly, depending on your business. For example, if you are a company selling NHL merchandise, you may decide that your best ROI will come from geotargeting a 50 mile radius around the stadium of each club, and using keywords related to each particular club in those geotargeted campaigns, while still running a generic national campaign.

So even when everyone encourages you to think globally, you should always think locally.

Filed under: PPC on Monday, October 1st, 2007 by Simon Heseltine |
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