The Optimizer’s Guide to Google AdWords: Location Targeting

If you live in a large town or city, chances are you have seen a form of advertising kindly referred to as “human billboards“. It’s also know as “human directionals”, “sign walkers” or “spinners”. Advertisers place spinners in the general geographic location of their their target audiences. What do spinners have in common with Google Adwords? They are great ways to target customers based on their location.

Why use Location Targeting?

Google AdWords’ location targeting is one of its most valuable tools. By identifying a user’s IP address, it can show specific ads to people in locations as specific as a particular neighborhood.

There are a number of reasons a business might be interested in location targeting:

• You are a small, local, business, and you may not be able to deliver pizza 3 states over.
• You have stores all over the country but are only having sales in certain locations. (Liquidation sales, regional products, weather focused products like snow blowers)
• You don’t ship your products and only use your website and ads as a way to attract walk-in customers. (Salons, gyms, dog groomers)

Taking advantage of AdWords’ location targeting can limit unqualified clicks and help you laser-target potential customers.

How do I use Location Targeting in Adwords?

1. Sign in to your AdWords account at https://adwords.google.com.
2. On the “All Online Campaigns” page, click the name of the campaign you wish to edit.
3. Click the “Settings” tab.
4. Click “Edit” next to “Locations.”

What are my Options?

1. By bundle (english-speaking countries, Latin America, etc.) - Google has prepared ready-made, practical, location collections that are easy to set-up.
2. By country (United States, Canada, Australia, etc.)- Simply select the countries you are interested in targeting and
3. By region (New York, San Jose, Boston, etc.) - E
4. By radius – Choose a point on the map and then select a radius around it where your ads will be shown.
5. By custom shape – Draw an area on the map, and even exclude certain points within the shape.

Google also uses query parsing to do location based targeting. In this case, Google extracts the location out of the query.  For example if you search for “Colorado Skiing” you might see Colorado targeted ads even if you are physically in Mississippi.

Making the Ad Copy more Local

Google also allows an address to be shown when it is relevant to a user’s location or search query. This great way of making your ad more personal and accessible in addition to easy to navigate to if the user is searching on the go. In the example below, you can see a few different formats.

You can learn more about implementing Location Extensions and best practices here.

If you are interested in learning more about what Google has to say about there location targeting service click here.

Have a location strategy? Share it in the comments!

Headlines That Teach You Something

In my recent post on How to Write 7 Types of Effective Headlines I wrote about how different headline types communicate different messages to your audience. In this post, the second in a series, I’ll dig further into one of the specific headline types and talk about the specific characteristics of it.

“Teacher” headlines, or headlines that teach you something, are used to describe web or landing page content that teaches readers something they didn’t already know. Here are some examples:

• Why Too Much Money is Worse Than Too Little
• The Responsibility Revolution for Companies
• Seven Leadership Traits that the Gurus Don’t Tell You

Teacher headlines are often used on landing pages as a signal of what you will receive when you progress further. In these cases the headline will often be one of the things to be learned, or the landing page will contain a few examples of things you can learn. Then, the call-to-action contains the full gamut of learning: perhaps it’s downloading a white-paper or signing up for a newsletter.

Here are some indicator words that alert you to a teacher headline:

• Why
• New
• Different
• Unique
• Better

The best teacher headlines dive deeper than what is common knowledge on a topic, telling you something you may have suspected but didn’t know the details about. The third headline above, Seven Leadership Traits That the Gurus Don’t Tell You, is on a page explaining that being a leader means mastering tough challenges like working while traveling and staying on a healthy diet in extremely unhealthy climates. This is valuable, non-obvious content that delivers on the promise in the headline.

There are two types of bad teacher headlines. One is when a headline promises to teach something…but that something is not interesting at all. These headlines fail to get visitors to read further. But the worst teacher headlines make a big promise and then simply fail to deliver, often recapitulating what everyone already knows anyway. When a headline promises to teach you something and then doesn’t, the effect isn’t neutral, it’s negative. It’s worse than nothing…don’t do it!

Teacher headlines are similar to “know-it-all” headlines in that they could offer practical tips or advice. However, there is one key difference: teacher headlines should really only be used for landing pages that offer new knowledge or original content. Do not use this type of headline if you are summarizing someone else’s content.

Another catchy teacher headline might be “A New Way to Make Ice Cream in 30 Seconds or Less,” which would then describe a technique that has not been marketed before. The call-to-action might be a link to purchase a product that helps you make ice cream quickly. In general the teacher headline hints at value either explicitly or implicitly. In this case the value is ice cream fast…and who wouldn’t want that?

Since teacher headlines are trying to convey new knowledge to you, they are almost always positive. No one wants to know about the worst ways to lead a company or the new technique that doesn’t work. Remember: tips and advice for how not to do something usually would fall under the “know-it-all” headline category.

The Optimizer’s Guide to Google AdWords: Display URL Strategy

For this week’s The Optimizer’s Guide series I’ve invited an expert in paid search, Ryan Jenkins, to talk about a display URL strategy he shared with me recently (after posting a comment on my post  How SEM Works). I hope you find it as useful as I have. – @JRachwalski

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When in the course of running SEM ads, it becomes necessary to write effective display URLs. “Wait a second, did he just say, ‘write effective display URLs?’” I did indeed.

I know what you’re thinking. You’re wondering what it means to ‘write effective display URLs’. They’re just URLs right? Well, yes and no. I’ll explain, but first some vocabulary.

What is a Display URL?

The display URL is the green Internet address that appears in the last line of your text-ad. It serves two purposes: (1) to quickly show the person searching who the ad is for, and (2) to give them an idea of where they’ll be taken if they click on the ad. The display URL is limited to 35 characters so keep it simple.

How is that different from the Destination URL?

The destination URL is the actual link that the searcher will be taken to. It is usually a longer (up to 1024 characters), more complicated looking URL such as this one:
http://www.amazon.com/Mountain-Three-Short-Sleeve-Medium/dp/B000NZW3J8/ref=sr_1_2/175-6251903-2449637?ie=UTF8&s=apparel&qid=1281735683&sr=8-2.

Pretty ugly isn’t it? To a normal Internet-using person that link doesn’t make a lot of sense. That’s why it’s so important to have a friendly-looking URL in the display URL!

Optimizing the Display URL

Let’s say you own a car dealership called “Bennett Car Sales” and you sell Toyotas. And let’s assume your website is BennettCarSales.com and you want your ad to appear every time someone searches for “affordable Corolla.” You have a couple of options when it comes to writing your display URL. Let’s start with the comprehensive display URL option.