The Clickable Search Engine Marketing Blog

(Clickable employees volunteer several hours a week to helping other search marketers succeed. “Clickable Gurus” participate in numerous online search communities to provide straightforward answers to numerous questions, and, each week, one of the gurus will post a search marketing tip to the Clickable Community Blog. Today, Trace explains a quirk of AdWords Geo-Targeting.)

Targeting your ads by city or region may sound straightforward, and it usually is. However, things get a little trickier if you select a “metropolitan area” rather than a single city. When you select a metropolitan area your ad will have an additional line after the destination URL indicating your target city and a default town name indicating how far out Google considers this metropolitan area to extend.  If you select the DC metro area, for example, your ad will display the following:

    Title
    Line 1
    Line 2
    Destination URL
    Washington, DC (Hagerstown, MD)

Hagerstown is about 70 miles north-west of Washington, and Google is indicating about how far they believe the “DC Metropolitan Area” extends by adding Hagerstown to the ad text. Why did Google select Hagerstown, MD as the default indicator of metro DC? I don’t know.  They just do. Advertisers find this confusing from time to time when they see this line – which they didn’t include – in their ads, but geo-targeting is a still an important and effective tool, and targeting by a metropolitan area can still be a powerful way to reach your audience. If you need to target your ads more precisely, however, you can use radius targeting (i.e., targeting ads a certain number of miles around an address you specify) or create a custom location using the AdWords “polygon” tool.

For more information on these options, check out our tutorials on Geo-Targeting in the SEM Concept Tutorial Section of Clickable University.

Good luck!

Trace, Clickable SEM Guru

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