I Love It When A Plan Comes Together: GeoTargeted Search Campaigns

Ok… I’m showing my age here but there are times when I want to light up a big cigar and quote Hannibal!

(For anyone that doesn’t know what I am talking about, watch the A-Team -not the movie, the old 80’s series: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_A-Team)

Am I feeling a little pleased with myself?

I applied some lateral thinking to a geographically-targeted paid search campaign and it’s showing signs of paying off.

Our client is a bricks-and-mortar retail business, primarily based in North East England. Unsurprisingly, they have their paid search campaign set up to target web users by their server location (IP Address) as this usually matches their physical location.

I’ve been asked to review the paid search activity and identify ways that we could improve the campaign’s performance.

Many aspects of the campaign are being reviewed but the first idea I implemented was to create a UK wide campaign!

Why would you do that for a North East of England client?

Let me explain…

• I created a separate campaign and specifically excluded the North East of England locations.
• The campaign only includes geographic keywords like ‘product in Newcastle’, ‘product in Sunderland’ etc.

The Performance

In four days:

• The campaign has received 37 clicks at a cost of £0.99 per click
• The click-through rate for the ad copy is 7.57%
• The average position of the ads is 1.9
• To date there have been 2 conversions at a cost of £18.31

In the last month, the main campaign averaged 8 conversions per week at a cost of £44 per conversion.

Why this Works

Contrary to popular belief, computers aren’t perfect and this certainly applies to identifying a web user’s location by their Web Server address (IP Address).

There are a small percentage of users whose IP location will be different to the area that they are located. This means that when they are searching for ‘product in Newcastle’ they will NOT see any paid search adverts that have been targeted to that area.

By setting up an additional campaign(s) in the manner described, you don’t miss out on this traffic.

This will not work for every client. You need to test it and evaluate the performance.

In time, I’m sure that IP location will become more accurate – therefore lessening the effectiveness of this tactic.

However if you ‘geo-target’ your paid search activity now, you could be missing out on traffic unless you apply this tactic.

Image credit – http://www.silverandblackpride.com/2010/6/16/1520576/i-love-it-when-a-plan-comes