Google Ads Location Targeting: 10 Smart Tips to Maximise Your ROI

Whether you’re operating a small business with a physical location or an e-commerce operation targeted at potential customers in a specific city, state, or country, ensuring your ads reach the right people is critical to success.

While you might assume this level of granular targeting is too complex for beginners, Google’s Location Targeting settings make it remarkably simple to reach your ideal customers wherever they live.

Instead of wasting your advertising budget on consumers not relevant to your business goals, you can focus on a small radius where conversions are most likely to occur. Below, we highlight how to get the most out of Location Targeting in Google Ads.

Review Your Location Settings

Before you delve deeper into Google Ads, ensure you configure your campaign’s basic location options to achieve your goals. First, double-check that your targeting settings will reach people based on their physical location or search interest.

So, what’s the difference? The former is how you target people currently in or regularly visiting a specific location. For example, if you operate a baseball shop in New York City, you can target people who visit the nearby sports fields.

If you’re looking for a less specific option, you can reach people whose search interests align with your business goals by targeting locations. For instance, people who recently searched for baseball shops in New York City.

Analyze Location Metrics

You must develop a highly informed view of how people in specific locations respond to your Google Ads. By focusing your attention on areas that consistently achieve impressive results, it’s possible to maximize your campaign’s return on investment.

To do so, check your Locations report in Google Ads. Here, you can review the performance of each targeted location with insightful statistics on clicks, impressions, average cost-per-click, and more. This makes it easy to identify the best-performing locations across your campaign.

Depending on your business goals, you can use this location data to spend your budget in the most fruitful regions. Alternatively, your location metrics might highlight how certain areas require more investment.

Use Negative Location Keywords

Negative keywords are one of the best ways to enhance your campaign targeting. To carefully refine your keyword selection, you can review the search terms report in Google Ads to identify and exclude certain keywords.

For instance, you might notice the keyword “baseball shops Chicago” triggers ads for customers that are largely irrelevant to your business. By adding this to your negative keyword list, you can avoid wasting your budget on poorly targeted locations.

If you only have a small budget, you want every dollar to go towards ads targeted at the ideal people. This fine-tuned approach can help a new or existing campaign achieve your business objectives.

Make Location-Based Bid Adjustments

The precise approach previously mentioned is best applied through data-driven bid adjustments. After you recognize how each location delivers different results, business owners leading a manual bidding strategy can adjust the percentage of their default bids in each place.

If you’ve noticed a trend in your Google Ads data where customers based in a target location, such as a town or country, are more likely to spend big, it could make sense to spend more of your budget in these areas.

So look over the location names in the data to find the best- and worst-performing areas for your keywords. Then, make informed bid adjustments to lower your cost-per-action and enhance your returns.

Appeal with Responsive Search Ads

Creating the perfect ad copy is crucial to every Google Ads campaign. Following the addition of location insertion for responsive search ads, business owners with multiple locations can benefit from automatically personalized ad text.

Using your campaign’s location targeting, dynamic location insertion sees Google include the city, state, or country within an ad’s headline, description, or both. This step can make your ad resonate with audiences even stronger.

Although this might seem like a minor change, using every opportunity to capture the attention of relevant customers can boost your success. Select dynamic location insertion to customize your next campaign.

Optimize with Location Exclusions

Just as you can insert locations and negative keywords, location exclusions are another powerful method that ensures your budget goes to the right place. From entire cities to specific postal codes, tailoring your approach is great for ROI.

For example, you might exclude a city where a competitor already dominates the marketplace. Meanwhile, you can remove neighborhoods near your business that serve little purpose for your goals.

You want to target ads using all Google Ads features to enhance your campaign’s results. Using this method to focus on the right locations will drive engagement from customers with the best chance of completing an action.

Boost Your Campaign with Google Trends

Your business needs to remain closely aware of shifting consumer behavior. While it’s nice to think that your target audience’s habits will stay the same, new trends constantly dictate how people respond to businesses.

So, how do you know what trends are influencing consumers? You can head to Google Trends to see how topics and keywords are explored based on location. This data feed can help you adapt to changes ahead of the competition.

When planning your next strategy, use the search bar to investigate trends relevant to your products and services. If you notice a particular change growing in specific regions, this information can make your location targeting a greater success.

Enhance Keywords with Targeted Locations

We’ve already explained how excluding specific keywords can ensure your advertising campaigns avoid location names where customers aren’t likely to purchase. However, the opposite is also true as you add region-specific terms to your keyword list.

By adding the location name to the end of an effective keyword, this long-tail approach can reach additional locations where possible customers are searching for a product or service like yours.

For instance, the more specific phrase “baseball shops New York City” is bound to attract more customers in your local area than a more generic alternative. Keep this in mind when conducting your keyword research.

Don’t Forget Location Extensions

Add location extensions at the end of your ad copy to make the most of every user engagement. This location targeting feature in Google Ads places your address information and phone number alongside the default text.

In addition, users on mobile devices will see a clickable ‘Call’ button next to your organization’s contact information. Naturally, this small but powerful change can lead to more customers interacting with your store.

With location extensions working across Google Search, the Google Display Network, Google Maps, and even YouTube, it helps you target locations where people are most likely to engage with your business.

Increase Performance with Google Ads Location Targeting

Alongside superior digital marketing techniques such as search engine optimization and social media advertising, consider using Google Ads Location Targeting to reach users in highly profitable selected locations.

Targeted locations like your top-performing cities and postal codes can vastly improve your PPC advertising results. To take your campaign’s success up another notch, team up with the experts at First Page.

Our highly trained specialists can design and execute a Google Ads strategy that enables your business to reach people physically located in the regions most beneficial to your organization. Get in touch today to learn more.