Let’s say you’re a storage company in Tulsa, Oklahoma. You’ve got a Google AdWords Account set up that is geographically targeted to the Tulsa metro area only, with geo-modified keywords such as “Tulsa storage unit rental” and “storage units in Tulsa” (and many more). Most of your customers are local, but not always. Occasionally, you’ll get “out of towner’s” who may be moving to Tulsa that would be in need of some additional storage space during the moving process. Currently, your Google ads display to both of these potential customers despite their location. The reason for this lies in the way that AdWords approaches geo-targeting and geo-modified (broad match) keywords.
AdWord’s geo-targeting is based on both a searcher’s IP-Address (location) as well as the searcher’s intent to determine whether or not they will see a geo-targeted ad. In the most obvious scenario, this means that if a searcher located in Tulsa types in “storage units in Tulsa” they are very likely to see your ad. This also means that the same searcher could potentially type in a non geo-modified version of this query (“storage units”) and still see your ad potentially because of the nature of geo-targeting and broad match terms in Google. This is because the searcher’s location is in Tulsa and their query didn’t specify another location so Google would assume that they are looking for storage units in their area and show your ad as a result. With both of these scenarios, the searcher could potentially see your ad as a result of your geo-targeted AdWords campaign based both on their location as well as their intentions.
In the case where a searcher is located in an area outside of the Tulsa metro area the searcher’s intent could potentially trigger your ad to display despite them being located outside of your geo-targeted area. An example being, a searcher in Boston is looking to move to Tulsa and needs a storage unit so they type in “storage units in Tulsa” from a computer in their current Boston home. The searcher’s intent here would allow the possibility of your ad displaying to them despite the searcher being located outside of your targeted area. Since this scenario would show your ad to potential customers of your business, this type of matching could be a benefit to your company even though it wasn’t likely your origin intention when you set up the campaign.
Up until now, your Storage Company has only been running campaigns on Google AdWords, but since the Yahoo-Bing search merger you’ve decided it’s time to tap into the 30% of the search market share that you’ve been missing. In the interest of saving time, you’ve decided to just copy your AdWords campaign and upload it into adCenter. Just like in AdWords, you set up your geo-targeting to focus on the Tulsa metro area and have the same list of geo-modified search terms. After some time you take a peek at your analytics data and realize that you’re not quite getting the same results that you were from your Google campaign. Upon further investigation, you notice that your adCenter campaign isn’t bringing in any queries from non geo-modified searches like “storage units” even in your local area of Tulsa. You also notice that those Boston searchers aren’t coming in either. How can this be?
The answer is really very simple. Unlike AdWords, your adCenter geo-targeting is based strictly on the searcher’s IP-Address. In other words, only searchers within the Tulsa metro will see your ads regardless of their intentions. This fundament difference between Google AdWords and adCenter means that a different approach is needed to accomplish the same goals.
In order to get the same coverage you had in your AdWords campaign, you’ll need to do two things. Firstly, you’ll need to add in non geo-modified keywords into your locally targeted Campaigns / Ad Groups (I’d recommend this on Google as well for optimal coverage and performance…). I would also suggest that these be segmented out into separate Ad Groups for performance reasons, rather than just lumping them in with the geo-mods. Additionally, you’ll need to build separate Campaigns / Ad Groups that contain only geo-modified keywords (“Tulsa storage units”) and geo-target these to the rest of the US (segmented as needed) in order to bring in those “out of towner’s”. Such a small difference in the way adCenter and AdWords approach geo-targeting and geo-modified search terms can easily result in the need for an entirely different approach.
Neither AdWords nor adCenter is “right” or “wrong” in their approach; they are just different and need to be treated accordingly. This is just one illustration of the many differences between these two search giants, gaining an understanding of these differences and learning how to change your strategy to fit each mold will only improve the performance of your PPC campaigns.