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Since I did the research for my last description of Google’s GeoTargeting in AdWords, things have changed. Searches that used to yield only nationally targeted adverts are now getting adverts that are targeted to city level. Advertising to mobile phones has been promoted hard by Google – so what happens there?
City and Regional Targeting
In January 2007, I did some tests that used a rare keyword. Think “curmudgeon” and an adjective like “blue” – that wasn’t it, but the same sort of thing – low advertiser volume, but some real pages would be returned. I used 100 different IP Addresses that I’d collected, to identify locations. Some of the IP Addresses were known to Google AdWords as only being in the UK. Other IP addresses were more precise, down to a town in the UK.
I created campaigns that targeted towns, some that targeted regions, and some that defined rectilinear areas using latitude and longitude. Each had unique adverts, so I knew which Campaign and AdGroup I was seeing. And I had unique keywords, and shared keywords, so I could explore attempts to trigger specific AdGroups, or to see which AdGroup would win, if several were competing.
In Jan 2007, if I used a non-localisable IP Address (one of the 20% or so that have no location in the UK smaller than “being in the UK”), then I got different results from someone using a localisable IP Address, even when I used a place name in the search query.
Now, when I ask for a place name in the geotarget, I see the advert, even when I’m not in the geotarget. Except for one curious case… Internationally. I’ll come back to that in a moment.
If I’m advertising in the US, then, and I set up for Boston Harbour Crab And Tackle, I can geotarget Boston… and when people type “boston crab”, my advert will be shown, with the magic fifth line that indicates a geotargeted advert. My advert probably won’t be shown if people type “oakland crab”… This is a major advance over what I saw last year.
Talking to some Googlers, it sounds as though Google has added “geotargeted search query parsing“. In other words, they look at the query and try to infer whether you really want local results. This is likely to be complicated in the USA for several place names. If I recall correctly, every state has at least one Springfield, and most states have a Jackson County – working out which one you mean could be interesting, if you miss out contextual geotargeting information, such as the State.
International Searches And Geotargets
It’s pretty good that you can geotarget a region within a country, and get searches inside the country and not only inside the region, when the searchers are interested in the geographic area… But what happens to overseas searchers? If I want to take a ski holiday in the south of France, can I see adverts targeted to specific areas? It seems not.
As of the experiments conducted in early Dec 2007 and Jan 2008, I can’t find any evidence in the US or the UK (two large markets for Google) that a query for a location, coming from an IP address outside the country, will get regional or smaller advertising targets.
The impact that this has on the design of campaigns is that you should have campaigns for non-domestic countries, with at least two sets of AdGroups. One set includes the geographical place names and the other set of AdGroups is substantially the same, but the keywords don’t mention the location – they may have negative keywords for locations where you know you won’t convert.
Going Mobile?
I’d have thought that mobile phones were the gold spot for geotargeted adverts… but right now, you can’t geotarget adverts for mobile phones on Google. I suspect that this will evolve. I mean, if I’m looking for “restaurant” on my mobile, I probably want something within a few miles. Unless I type “restaurant boston” – when I want Boston restaurants.
I P Location
I haven’t seen any significant advances in technique, deployed in databases. Accuracy and precision are probably still dependent on the country, and still require pretty large targets for accuracy.
However, the increased access of non-local searchers, now allowed to see locally targeted adverts, may more than compensate for the low accuracy in some countries. There’s a mildly complex calculation to show whether geotargeting should be used, depending on the (per country) variable rates of searches using location names in search and the IP location accuracy.
Conclusions
Google continues to evolve geotargeting. It’s more useful this year than last year. I suspect that is a synergestic effort with the organic search results, which can also be improved by better location tuning.
This evolution is to be expected – economic analyses usually show that the bulk of people’s purchases are made within a few miles of the home location. So local targeting is likely to be important – a lesson that can be learned from the rising prominence of sites like eBay’s Gumtree and newer sites such as Qype.
Search query parsing is pretty tricky. I still have some experiments to do to determine the full impact of searches like “flight from london to new york” to see how effective the parsing is… Does the location of a searcher affect results? Does it figure out that “London” is the location for this search and suppress Manchester or Birmingham sources for flights?
This does complicate web analytics. AFAICS, previously I could be pretty certain that IP addresses for a geotargeted campaign were delivered from inside my desired target. This still seems to be true at country level. Below country level, if and only if the search has come from the same country, then search query parsing may allow non-local searchers to find small region geotargets.
Search Query Parsing may now allow geotargeted campaigns that were pretty marginal (because of the low accuracy of IP Location services) to be more cost effective, despite the additional management activity for the multiple campaigns.