I was speaking with a friend the other day and the issue of Google Adwords came up (the program where you bid on keywords and when someone clicks your ad, they are taken to your site and you pay that .10 cents or whatever your bid was). The talk turned to how expensive it can be, but after giving some general tips there was one more most people don’t think to do, that’s plan their campaigns geographically.

One of the features of Adwords is you can set it to just display your ad by country, state, or even a specific city. Only those people can see your ad and it’s a very powerful feature. If you’re selling tangible goods and don’t want to ship them to Europe or Asia then why display your ad (and pay for the clicks) to people there? Sure, if it’s an electronic product like an E-book or software, then you may as well sell to all comers, but otherwise you can save significant money by customizing your campaign by geographic area.

For a couple of examples, I spoke with one guy who was licensed to do mortgages in just one state, so he saved a bushel of money just displaying ads in that state. Kelly Felix (aka The Rich Jerk) uses it in a black hat way, by advertising a competitors trademarked keywords, but he excludes the companies state in those ads so they wouldn’t see it and wouldn’t complain to Google which would get the ad pulled.

One online Jewelry store owner checked a map of the worst hit by the housing bubble and excluded them in his jewelry ads, keeping to areas where real estate prices were more stable and less foreclosures. It all depends on what you’re offering as how to save the most money or maximize your target audience. There’s even places that for a fee, will show nationwide infomercial schedules so you can target say, exercise equipment ads in areas where they are playing lots of competing infomercials for those kinds of products. One guy who sold software got a lot of fraud orders from Nigeria and Africa.  I told him to turn that country off, and when he did the fraudulent credit card orders vanished.

It’s a very powerful tool, and most people just create a campaign without setting those options. If you sell high end goods, you can do a Google search of the “wealthiest cities in America” and really get down to business. There’s a mountain of statistics if you search, and finding out what areas buy the most of your products can really increase the effectiveness of your campaigns when you set those keywords just to display to people in those areas.

I hope this helps your campaigns, as always if you have any tips please shoot us a comment.

Nick