Reaching local prospects

A lot of advertisers – everyone from realtors to dog walkers, florists to dentists – take advantage of local targeting to specify the cities or regions (or even latitude and longitude coordinates!) where their ads should show.

For businesses which serve particular states, cities, or regions, this is an effective way of focusing your AdWords campaign on your target audience. So how does it work? If a San Francisco dog walking company creates a campaign targeted to the San Francisco area with keywords such as ‘dog walking’ and ‘dog walkers,’ their ad will show when a user, whose Internet Protocol (IP) address identifies her as being located in San Francisco, searches for those keywords.

Google can usually identify the IP address of the searcher to determine their location, then show ads targeted to the relevant area. However, some Internet Service Providers (ISPs) use a relatively small number of shared IP addresses for a large number of users. In these cases, since we can’t always determine the user’s regional location, we show national and global ads only.

But don’t despair! There’s a way to help ensure that your ads reach as many people as possible in your target area, including users whose location can’t be identified from their IP addresses. Here’s how: in addition to your locally targeted campaign, create another nationally targeted campaign with region-specific ad text and keywords. Our San Francisco dog walkers would target the entire United States, but use keywords like “san francisco dog walker” and “sf dog walking company.” Their ad text for this campaign would make it clear that their business was located in San Francisco as well.

For more information about creating local and national campaigns, check out this quick guide.

Posted by Arielle, Inside AdWords crew