Intro to AdWords (Part 2): Location Targeting

A fundamental point to understand about advertising your products or services via the Google AdWords pay-per-click (PPC) system is that you can target the geographic location of where your ads will display. Why pay for advertising in a location that does your business no good? Just as a real estate consultant in Chicago would not buy a Yellow Pages ad in Atlanta, any other local business professional would not need to pay for ads to appear in places where you do not service clients.

Target Your Ads For Your Business

If you are a regional consultant, contractor, restaurant owner or ANY local business who caters to a local market, it makes no sense to advertise all over the world, or even all over your own country, for that matter. Of course, even if you do sell a product that could be shipped anywhere in the world, you still might only advertise in English-speaking countries, until you could at least generate ads in the language pertinent to each country.

Furthermore, if you only ship products within one country or continent, it makes no sense to pay for advertising in places where you don’t ship.

This may seem obvious, but I have encountered business owners who have been discouraged by their advertising results on AdWords, only to learn that they were paying for a North American campaign when their service primarily catered to the northern part of Los Angeles County.

Types of Geographical Location Targeting

Some of the ways you can geographically target your Google AdWords PPC advertising is by selecting the country, state, region, city or zip code(s) that you want your ads to appear in. There are also customized geographical zones that you can select. For example, you could designate that your ads only display to searchers within a radius of a certain amount of miles around a point on a map (such as your business). Furthermore, you could exclude areas if you wanted. So, for example, if you market a product or service that is legally restricted in specific U.S. states (such as certain financial services), then you would target your ads in the United States and exclude the restricted states.

Conversely, even if you sell and deliver a product or service all over North America, you might still want to use location targeting as part of a testing process that might start in a smaller region before expanding to larger regions as your advertising is refined via testing, testing and more testing. Having said that, a more common way to test your initial ads is by controlling how much you spend per day for your AdWords advertising, which is a simple setting within your AdWords account.

OK, without belaboring this anymore, the point here is to take advantage of the geographical locations you can designate so that you are not paying for clicks that won’t turn into revenue for you.

Click here to view the current Introduction to Google Adwords series, and check back to see more as the series continues to expand.

Intro to AdWords (Part 1)

AdWords is what makes Google rich. However, used effectively, AdWords, as an online pay per click advertising system, can generate leads and sales and in that way also make some business owners rich.

Conversely, you can also lose money through these little advertisements that are somewhat akin to online classified ads, which show up along search results (or within websites and blogs). In fact, it’s likely that when you start using AdWords to drive traffic to your website that you will lose money – at least in the beginning.

AdWords is Google’s main source of revenue, which is a testament to its popularity to advertisers around the world. And its popularity is a result of a profitable fact: It works.

And by “works,” what I mean is that you can readily drive traffic to your website. And you only need to pay for those visitors who click on an ad to arrive on your website.

Therein lies the simple elegance of AdWords: You pay for targeted traffic. Not only that, you choose the targeting of the ads by way of the selection of keywords.

If you are selling digital cameras, you can create ads that show up when web searchers enter the term “digital cameras” into Google’s search engine. If the ads are compelling enough, visitors will click on the ads and arrive on your site.

Furthermore, you can influence how high your ad is positioned on the search results page by bidding a higher amount to display your ad than your competitors. In reality, there is more to this than just how much you pay (such as how effective your ad and landing page are), but the bidding does serve as an important factor determining the position of your ad.

There is more to know about AdWords as an advertising media to drive traffic to your website.  This is the first part of what will be a several part series on using AdWords to successfully increase your online profits.

Click here to view the current Introduction to Google Adwords series, and check back to see more as the series continues to expand.

Internet Advertising Revenues (1st Half 2009)

With a notable recession in play, what are the numbers for internet advertising?  As reported via TechCrunch, U.S. Internet Ad Revenues Decline 5.3% In First Half 2009.

The source of the data is from a report by the Interactive Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers, released today, which focuses on the first 6 months of 2009.

Here’s a couple takeaways from the report:

• Search revenue accounted for 47 percent of 2009 second-quarter revenues, up from the 44 percent reported in the second quarter of 2008. Display advertising, the second largest format, accounted for 35 percent, followed by classifieds (10 percent) and Lead Generation (7 percent) of 2009 second-quarter revenues.
• Search has remained the leading format since 2004, and has had strong sequential growth over this period. Search is followed by Display Banners and Classified/Directories in percentage share of Internet advertising.

Free Media Planning Tools

If you need to research niche sites for targeting media purchases, Harry Gold, at ClickZ, offers a post on Great Free Media Planning Tools.

Do It Yourself Online Ad Buying Services

If you need to test a campaign and want to start with a very small budget, say a few hundred dollars, you are not the type of advertising client that publishers with lots of advertising inventory are going to cater to. And this is understandable as the profit for the publisher is too small, relative to the work load of getting everything set up and running.

It’s not unusual for online publishers to require minimum campaign expenditures of $10,000 and up.

Although PPC advertising via search engines may be pertinent for a number of budget applications (including low), the choices and options for online advertising expand considerably beyond search.

“The Definitive List of Self-Serve Online Ad Buying,” by Hollis Thomases (link below), offers a useful list of do-it-yourself ad buying services, compartmented into the following categories.

♦ Self-Serve Display Ads

♦ Self-Serve Text and Contextually Targeted Ads

♦ Self-Serve Multiple Ad Types

♦ Self-Serve Lead Generation

♦ Self-Serve Local Ads

♦ Self-Serve Social Media Ads

♦ Self-Serve Mobile Ads

♦ Self-Serve Video Ads

Also, be sure to review the comments under that post for additional resources.

Here’s the link to the article: The Definitive List of Self-Serve Online Ad Buying.

Overview of Online Media Planning and Buying

Harry Gold, at ClickZ, wrote about the basics (and some “advanced” concepts) of planning and purchasing online media. Additionally, he notes that:

“Media planning and buying is all about independent research and being able to grasp complex advertising concepts and technologies.”

Click the following link to review how he has delineated online media buying, using the title “Research Tips for Landing a First Online Media Job.”

Defending Against Click Fraud

AnchorIntelligence.com partnered with LookSmart.com to present a report entitled, ANCHOR INTELLIGENCE REPORT: ANATOMY OF A FRAUDSTER. The following excerpt offers useful tips for monitoring and defending against click fraud for your pay-per-click campaigns:

1) Watch for significant variations in campaign performance: Look at your reports to identify sudden peaks and other anomalies in your daily traffic and costs. If you cannot determine the cause and the peaks are not associated with corresponding lifts in performance, consider stopping your campaign and/or asking your network to investigate further.

2) Prevent competitive click fraud: Do a few searches on your keywords to compile a list of relevant competitors. Then open your Command Prompt on your PC (or Terminal on your Mac) and ping each competitor’s domain (e.g. type “ping www.COMPETITORDOMAINNAME.com”) to ascertain their company IP address. You can find their entire range of IPs by using services such as www.arin.net. Be sure to check that the IPs are registered to the company directly, as opposed to the company’s hosting provider. If they are, add those IPs to your account IP exclusion lists (when available).

3) Don’t drain your own budget: If you’re concerned about clicks coming from your own employees, add your company’s IPs to your account IP exclusion lists (when available).

4) Block poor performing referrers: Assuming your analytics package provides referral and conversion information, start with your highest volume referrers and determine which sites fail to drive any conversions or other useful user sessions. If you notice that your ads/keywords are performing poorly on particular sites, reduce your bids for those publishers/channels. For high volume sites that generate zero conversions, selectively use the domain/channelblocking feature to prevent your ads from appearing on those sites in the future.

5) Monitor high dollar CPC terms closely: Keywords with high CPCs have historically been more vulnerable to click fraud attacks than those with low CPCs. So pay particular attention to these keywords and the referrers that generate disproportionately more traffic to your site through these keywords. Determine whether or not you’re seeing a positive ROI on your bids. If not, consider lowering your bids on poor-performing keywords/ads and allocating more spend to higher performing keywords/ads.

6) Geo-target your ads appropriately: If you do not sell products outside of North America, be sure to limit your geo-targeting to North America. If you do sell products abroad, monitor the performance of your international ads. If you find that your ads perform poorly in certain geographies, update your geo-targeting preferences accordingly. Keep a critical eye out for countries such as UAE, China, Vietnam, Thailand, and the Philippines. Anchor has seen relatively high volumes of fraud originating from these countries.

7) Use ad scheduling: Monitor the quality of your traffic according to time of day and day of the week. For instance, we find that humans typically use the internet during the day, while bots can run 24 hours a day. If you find that your conversion rates are higher in the mornings than late at night, you may want to daypart your bids to reduce exposure to lower-converting traffic.

8) Leverage a 3rd party traffic quality solution: Your ad network/search engine is not infallible. In order to ensure that you are not being charged for fraudulent clicks, consider using a 3rd party traffic quality solution, such as Anchor Intelligence. By providing deep insight into the quality of each click/impression as well as the factors that contribute to each click/impression score, Anchor Intelligence helps to educate you on click fraud and traffic quality. Armed with this information, you’ll be able to improve your ad spend allocation decisions and ensure you are not paying for unwanted traffic.

9) Investigate your network: Before signing up with an ad network or search engine, do some research into its policies. For instance, you should determine whether the network uses frequency caps to prevent duplicate clicks originating from the same IP from being charged to your account. Also check to ensure that they are using the IAB/ABCe International Spiders & Bots List and not charging you for clicks from these robots. Finally, peruse their Terms of Use to determine the extent to which they care about the quality of traffic you receive. For example, look for restrictions against authorizing, encouraging, or generating fraudulent clicks or impressions; editing, modifying, removing, or obscuring ads; and displaying ads on error pages or “thank you” pages.

10) Encourage your ad network(s) to also use 3rd party scoring solutions: Your ad network may not realize that you are concerned about click fraud. The more you and other advertisers ask networks to take additional steps to prevent and filter click fraud, the more likely these companies will be to proactively protect you. In particular, you should encourage your network(s) to engage the services of 3rd party traffic quality solutions providers. These 3rd parties monitor the traffic quality within and across networks, to help ensure that you see the highest possible ROI on your advertising spend while giving you confidence in the quality of your clicks.