The Clickable Search Engine Marketing Blog

The barriers to national and international commerce are smaller than ever.  A small company can now sell to markets all over the world with a Web site and FedEx.  Of course, paid search can help you easily connect with potential customers in those markets. Following are a few critical techniques explaining how.

Geo Targeting
Many people do not know the depth of Google’s geo-targeting capabilities.   If you are not familiar with the basics of local search marketing, it would be helpful for you to read our recent post on local advertising before you move on to more advanced targeting.

Now, let’s take an example of an Event Planning firm that coordinates events in New York but also offers talent booking.  The firm notices that talent-booking services are something they could offer to clients all over the United States.  But what should the firm's approach be to targeting clients who are looking for talent, but don't want to hold their event in New York?  The answer is multiple campaigns with multiple targeting settings.

Since New York event planning is the firm's most lucrative division, there are two campaigns they need to set up: a local campaign that geo-targets the New York area, and a geo-modified campaign which targets the entire country. 

The local campaign should include broad and exact match terms such as "event planning" and "party planning".  Then, under campaign settings, the geo-targeting should be set to "New York".  There are multiple options the firm can choose from when setting up geo-targeting.  They can select "New York State", or "New York City Metro Area".  They can also target coordinates on a map by radius or even by outlining an area.  Since they do event planning statewide, the Event Planning firm should select "New York State" as their geo-targeting option.

After setting up a statewide campaign, the firm should set up a national campaign with geo-modified terms such as "New York event planning".  This will allow anyone in the United States searching for New York event planning to find them.

Language Targeting
The firm has also observed that their talent booking is mostly focused on Latin artists.  With this in mind, the Event Planning firm should also advertise in Spanish.  This means they need separate ads and landing pages, as well as separate local and national campaigns.  After translating their campaigns into Spanish, the firm can simply set the location targeting to be the same as their local and national campaigns. They can then change the language targeting to Spanish by navigating to "campaign settings" and choosing the "Spanish" option under "language".

Other Tips
Google doesn't allow advertisers to display multiple ads from the same account (or any number of accounts since it is against Google's terms of service) for a single search term.  The most targeted of the firm’s ads will display if they have multiple layers “blanketing” their customer.  For example: if a person in New York searched for a party planner and the firm has a local campaign running for the term "party planner" and also has "New York party planner" running in a national campaign, the local term would be the ad triggered.  For more information on which ad would be triggered you can read Google's answers here and here.

Trace, SEM Guru

Note: 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 posts a search-marketing tip to the Clickable Blog.