Google Ads Location Targeting in 2024 – Expert Tips For Best Results

2 months ago

Google Ads Location Targeting in 2024 – Expert Tips For Best Results

Location targeting or geofencing in your Google Ads – that’s what we’re going to talk about in this article. Specifically, I’ll walk you through step by step how to set it up correctly. And make sure you read through to the end of the article, because I’ll also show you pitfalls that you can avoid to prevent unnecessary or wasted ad spend.

Okay, so setting up the right location targeting is critical for success with your Google ads. I’ve seen a number of people do this incorrectly, resulting in a really a ridiculous amount of wasted ad spend. And frankly, I think Google’s kind of making enough money as it is, they don’t need any more of your hard earned cash. So getting the right location targeting is imperative.
Regardless of what type of campaign that you are running- whether it’s a Google search, display, or YouTube campaign, the location targeting applies to all those types of campaigns. And finally, it’s important to know that you set the location targeting at the campaign level. Okay, so here we are in my live Google Ad Account.

Now, here we are in my live Google Ad Account. As you can see, I’ve gone straight to the campaign settings section. And very sneakily, Google’s default setting is to target all countries and territories.

There is absolutely no way that you should do that. Nor do I recommend you doing that. So you definitely want to change these default settings.

It’s showing Australia here for me, because that’s where this account was set up. But what you’re going to do is enter another location. So, here, I’m actually going to click on Advanced Search.

And you’ll see for this particular country, I’ve just set it up for United States,

but actually I don’t recommend you do this, really, this comes down to what type of business you have.

For most businesses, they target very specific geographical regions, especially if they’re local businesses like dental practices, law firms, or plumbing services. So, depending on the nature of your business and where your customers are located, it will determine the regions you want to select.

For instance, if you’re a dental practice in Los Angeles, some people might make the mistake of simply typing ‘Los Angeles’ here:

They target all of Los Angeles, not realizing the massive area encompassed by this geo-targeting, which includes 17 million people.

Now, if you’re a dental practice located in a specific area of Los Angeles, understanding the vast size of the city and its notorious traffic, you’ll realize that someone from the other side of town won’t likely travel all the way across town just to visit a dental practice, especially if they’ve never been there before.

So, you really want to be very laser-focused and targeted with your geofencing or geo-targeting in your ads. What I suggest you do is enter a specific location, like the suburb or neighborhood that you service. The great thing is you can target multiple suburbs and layer them that way. You can also make some strategic bid adjustments for areas that perform well, rather than targeting one massive area.

For instance, let’s say this particular dental practice is in Beverly Hills, as that’s probably the only suburb I know. If I target that, you’ll see how it zooms right into this area, narrowing my reach to 206,000 people rather than a whopping 17 million. Then, I can look to layer certain regions, targeting all of them.

Okay, so I definitely want to think about doing that. If you’re unsure of what the area names are and stuff, you can actually toggle this to show all areas. If I zoom out a little bit, you’ll see these areas in gray.

Alright, so these are the defined areas within Google. If I click on one, it’s going to show me the reach of it. For instance, Beverly Hills 91. Then, there are other zip codes for America, or postcodes for many other areas, each with their respective reach. I can target these areas individually, and as you can see, the blue area is the one that I have selected

So this is a really handy tool that you can use to show all areas or you can show by postcode.

And you can drill down and I find it very handy to help that way. The other method you can do is what’s called radius targeting.

And I’m also a really big fan of radius targeting.

You can input the place name, address, or any other type of name, and it will search for it. Then, you enter a radius.

For example, let’s say we want to target a five-mile radius around Beverly Hills, like this. As you can see, it places a ring around Beverly Hills or the particular place that I’ve entered.

Obviously, I can adjust this to be bigger or smaller and change it to miles or kilometers. Also, you can set up multiple types of radius targeting. So, definitely consider using this as a form of location targeting as well.

If I show you here, in this particular ad account, you’ll see this in practice, with multiple areas targeted

And that helps me sort of target certain regions, rather than choosing all of California. And then I can compare the performance of the different regions here.

if I click on location options down here, you’ll see that the default setting here,

I can see the different conversion rates for each of the regions and then consider applying different bid adjustments. For instance, the conversion rate in San Francisco is 12%, whereas in other areas it might be as low as 5%.

As I mentioned at the start of the article, some of the sneaky settings are located here. If I click on location options down here, you’ll see that the default setting is.

which is recommended, is the Presence or interest, so people in regularly in or who’ve shown interest in your target location.

So this is really the key thing here who’s shown interest in your target location. So my recommendation is not to choose that one, but to choose this particular one, Presence: People in or regularly in your targeted locations.

Choosing the ‘Presence or interest’ option may lead to instances where people who are not physically in your target location but have shown interest in it see your ad. These individuals might not be your target customers. For example, someone in Australia searching for something related to Beverly Hills might see the ad, which is definitely not desirable.

Therefore, choosing ‘Presence: People in or regularly in your targeted locations’ is the closest you can get to being accurate with location targeting

I want to show you something else as well. If we go to Advanced Search, you can also exclude regions. For instance, let’s say you want to exclude Australia or Austria. You can target them and then exclude them, which will show them in red here.

Just for an extra layer of security, let’s say you’re receiving some spam or something. I often find that excluding regions can also be helpful in ensuring that my ads aren’t reaching beyond the scope of what I’ve selected.

So, there you have it. That’s my advice for location targeting for your campaigns, regardless of the type of campaign you’re running.