Chapter 5: Language & Location Targeting

Chapter V: Language & Location Targeting

Language and Location Targeting Basics

In order to get the best ROI for your ad spend, you'll want to show your ads for customers in the right geographic locations and for the right language. You can adjust both your target location and language through your campaign settings.

Location Targeting

Use location targeting to target ads to specific geographic locations. You can target entire countries, areas within a country, cities, zip codes, regions, and a radius around a location. You can also choose to exclude ads from geographic locations through location exclusions. This prevents your ad from showing in certain areas within your targeted locations. That means you can select a state and then exclude certain cities (if it makes sense to do so).  Location targeting can help you get more mileage from your budget.

Ad reach is the number of  users your AdWords ad might reach within a certain geographic area. It's just an estimate that they base upon the number of unique cookies clicking on your ad.

AdWords will notify you if there's a low number of users for that particular location. If this is the case you'll receive a 'limited reach' warning. This will let you know to expand your location so there are enough people seeing or clicking on your ad for it to be worth your while.

Refine Location Targeting

If you use location targeting, you can and should view your ad's performance by location and make sure your ads are actually appearing in certain locations. You'll be able to view your CTR and the number of clicks you're getting.

This will help you see how your location dependent ads are performing. By looking at the statistics, you can assign more of your budget to high performing areas.

Another tip is to write ad text that calls out to certain geographic areas to help increase the relevance of your ads. You can even use location targeting to offer promotions to specific locations only.

To further refine your marketing and increase your ad's effectiveness, you can use location-specific landing pages. Send people from a certain location to a special landing page created just for them. Use the location in the text on the landing page so they realize it truly is a customized page.

Advanced Location Options

Advanced location options allow you to reach or exclude people based on where they're actually located or on patterns they use to search on Google. These search patterns can include places they're searching for and if they're viewing pages about your target location.  You can choose targeting options to reach people or exclusion options to exclude people based on their location and search patterns.

Advanced location options apply to ads on both the Search Network and the Display Network. With the Display Network, AdWords may look at the language of the pages someone is viewing or has recently viewed to determine which ads to show. 

Google uses IP addresses to help target ads to users based on physical location.

Location Extensions

Use location extensions to highlight your business address and share your location and contact information with your customers, especially those that are nearby. They can call or find your nearest store. This works great for mobile users.

Language

Make sure you target the language your customers speak so you reach the right audience. Choose your target language from within your campaign settings. Language settings work for both the Search and the Display Network.

The AdWords language targeting feature helps you target the people who use the language your campaign targets. Campaigns always target searches with a matching interface language. Your ads will show for viewers who have the same Google interface language settings that your campaign targets.

AdWords will not translate ads or keywords, you must write your ads in the right language. Instead, language targeting will allow you to target ads written in any given language to those who speak that language.

There are many different Google search engine homepages targeting different countries (and different languages).  For example, if you search on google.ru (the Russian version of the Google search engine) then you will be presented with search engine results pages in Russian. However, viewers can change their default language through the preferences link on the Google homepage. 

As an example, a Spanish speaking individual in the U.S. can perform searches on the US domain, Google.com, but could change the interface language settings to Spanish. In this case they would see ads targeting Spanish instead of English.