{"id":117087,"date":"2013-05-10T22:39:00","date_gmt":"2013-05-11T03:39:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.dacgroup.com\/how-granular-should-you-be-with-your-paid-search-geo-targeting\/"},"modified":"2024-12-19T16:39:58","modified_gmt":"2024-12-19T21:39:58","slug":"how-granular-should-you-be-with-your-paid-search-geo-targeting","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.dacgroup.com\/en-ca\/insights\/blog\/local-search\/how-granular-should-you-be-with-your-paid-search-geo-targeting\/","title":{"rendered":"Geo-granularity in Paid Search"},"content":{"rendered":"

We all know by now that search is an effective channel for local marketing<\/a>. Marketing through search at the local level is best practice for businesses with physical locations (and even for some without), but doing that at scale can be tricky. If you have a business with multiple locations, you\u2019ll want to ensure that people searching in a particular area get served an ad that calls out the city they\u2019re in. Ideally, you would show offers for that city and drive to the landing page specifically for that city. The most straightforward way to accomplish this is to create one campaign for each city and set the geo-target to that city alone.<\/p>\n

\"geo-targeting<\/a><\/p>\n

So what if you have 1,500 cities? And then what if you want to split your budget by brand vs. non-brand? This means you have to create 3,000 campaigns. If you have 50 ad groups per campaign, you\u2019re now dealing with 150,000 ad groups and potentially millions of keywords. This can start to get pretty messy for day-to-day management.<\/p>\n

The level of geo-granularity when it comes to structuring paid search campaigns<\/a> is an on-going struggle. As the space becomes increasingly competitive, appearing as the most relevant ad on the SERP is critical.\u00a0 To accomplish this, should you geo-target strictly at the city level and create one campaign per city? Should you create one campaign at the state level and geo-target only the list of cities where you have locations? Or should you target the entire state and separate your locations using ad groups?<\/p>\n

I tested two of these scenarios.<\/p>\n

Test 1:<\/strong><\/p>\n

For a company with 40 locations in the state of Texas, for a 14 day period, I created one campaign for each city and set the geo-targeting for each campaign to that city only. For the next 14 days, I created one campaign, and geo targeted the same list of 40 cities, but all within one campaign. Keywords, ad copy and max CPC bids stayed the same.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
Metric<\/td>\n40 Campaigns – 40 Cities<\/td>\n1 Campaign – 40 Cities<\/td>\n% Change<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Impressions<\/td>\n37,533<\/td>\n68,232<\/td>\n81.79%<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Clicks<\/td>\n711<\/td>\n1,353<\/td>\n90.30%<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
CTR<\/td>\n
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