Using AdWords Geo targeting effectively with Google Analytics

Most of us know how well Google AdWords PPC ads can work for online businesses. With not all too much tweaking you can get targeted traffic to your site at a fairly low cost (depending on the niche you operate in). A lot of businesses know that visitors from certain geographical regions are much more valuable in that they convert more easily and thus result in higher ROI (Bigger Bang for Buck). By being able to invest only in these more valuable visitors you can get much better results from your PPC campaigns.

AdWords offers a feature called Geo targeting, which enables you to have your AdWords ads show up only for people from specific geographical regions, and with the help of Google Analytics you can find out where your best converting visitors live. This post will give you a guide on how you can get the info you need and make the changes in AdWords.

How do you find out which geographical regions you should target in AdWords for better ROI?

It’s fairly easy and I’ll give you a short explanation plus a bunch of steps to follow.

What you need first:

1. You need to have your goals set up in Google Analytics
2. You need to link your AdWords account to Google Analytics

With these two things you’ll be able to figure out which keywords provide you with site visitors through AdWords and how many of them reach your Goals (purchase, registration, sign-up). Using the segment option, which is available in most reports, you can take your AdWords campaigns report in Google Analytics and segment that data by continent, country, region and city. With that knowledge you can target specific geographical locations in AdWords.

These are the steps you need to follow:

1. Go to Google Analytics and find your way to the AdWords Campaigns report by following Traffic Sources, then AdWords.
2. Select a reasonably large date range. I’d suggest at least two months worth of data to avoid anomalies skewing up your data and giving you an unreliable view of what you need to know
3. Just below the report graph you’ll find the Segment option, which allows you to segment the AdWords campaigns data by continent, country, region and city
4. Just below the Segment option you’ll find the report tabs. You can either select the Goal Conversion tab, to view report data based on conversion rate, but you can also select the Clicks tab which gives you a monetary view of your visitors (but depends on whether your Google Analytics is set up for eCommerce reporting)
5. Determine which visitors are most valuable to you (sort the report data by clicking any of the column titles, e.g. Goal Conversion Rate or ROI)
6. Go to AdWords, select your first campaign and in the top details select the Edit option for location targeting, which will open up a map overlay.
7. In the map overlay you can either select all continents/countries/regions/cities you want to target (AdWords allows for very granular targeting) or you can choose to exclude, for example, countries from continents, or regions from countries, or cities from regions, etc.
8. Do the same with all campaigns you want to enable Geo targeting for.

And that’s it! Your ads will show up only in the regions you want them to. With a little testing and tinkering you should be able to get much more out of your PPC ads using Geo targeting in AdWords, based on your Google Analytics segmented data!