All right today.
We're talking about Google ads location targeting.
And what I want to do is I want to show you the kind of settings that we use in our Google
ads agency, but also the mistakes that you should avoid making so that you can get the
most bang for your buck.
Let's get started.
Hi Mike Mancini here.
And when it comes to Google ads location targeting, you really need to take just a little bit
of extra time to make sure you get this correct.
And the reason is, is because you have a finite budget, right?
Unless you have all the money in the world, you have a limited budget.
You want to make sure that you are putting all of that budget to the locations that are
going to get you the best returns.
But you're not going to know that right away, right?
You need some data.
You need to figure out what locations are going to work best for you.
So I'm going to show you how to do that.
Let's jump into some accounts.
So once you're inside your account, what you need to do is go to settings, click on location.
What you can do is just click, enter another location and click advanced search.
Now start with your general area.
So I happen to live in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Okay.
We're just going to click on this and we'll hit target just to pull up the right area.
Now, your Google ads location targeting is absolutely essential to the success of your
campaign.
If you have a smaller budget, let's say under a thousand dollars a month, you don't want
to be targeting a massive area.
And I know the thought goes, "Well, I want to get business from wherever I can."
But what you need to understand is there are going to be pockets of clients that you are
going to find.
And what's going to happen is the majority of your business is going to come from those
pockets of people.
The quicker you find those pockets, the better because then you can stop spending money in
other places.
All right?
So what I want to do is I want to show you just a quick little diagram here.
I'm going to use this as an example.
So, here's that block of Minneapolis that we're looking at.
Okay.
Now this is an entire area that has a reach of 4.9 million people.
Unless you're a massive business, you probably can't serve that many people, but let's say
you're targeting a whole area with a thousand dollars a month.
That means you have $33 to spend.
So let's say your clicks are running on average $5.
Okay.
Let's just use it for easy math.
You're going to get six clicks a day.
So the first day you get a click here.
You get one here, here, here, here, and here.
There's your 30 bucks, right?
You spent your $30, your ads shut off.
The next day.
You get one here, here, three, four, five, six, okay.
In a large pocket of people, as your campaign moves forward, this is going to be harder
to determine where your best customers are from because what you're going to end up finding
is over time, if you have a bigger budget, you're going to see that you have a lot of
customers come from here and a lot come from here and a bunch from here, right?
What you want to do then is you want to avoid all of these other clicks because every time
one of those clicks hits, it's going to be $5 dollars that could be going to these areas.
Okay?
So what we want to make sure is that we have our $30 a day going to these pockets.
So how do we figure out what those pockets are?
We sort them down by zip codes sounds a little bit harder than it really is, but as you see,
you got the entire area of Minneapolis here.
We wouldn't want to target that whole area.
So what we want to do is we want to click on show areas and we can scroll in and we
can just click on an area and you see it's a zip code here.
Let's target that one and let's target this one, go there.
Let's go here.
Now let's say that we want to...
Oh, right here's the airport.
Let's say we don't want to advertise over in that area.
So all we would do is we can click on that one and we can click exclude.
And that red section will come up.
Now, there are other ways to do this.
You can do it and radius as well.
Maybe we're downtown Minneapolis.
We want to go out five miles in every direction.
All you have to do is click on radius, switch your radius here, go five, and then type in
your location.
So you can say target.
So, as you can see, it drops a pin right in the middle of Minneapolis, and it goes out
five miles.
Now, the problem with that is once again, is going back to our diagram.
If you have a radius of five miles, here's your middle, here's your middle point.
You're going to have a customer here and one here and one here in one year.
What you want to do is you want to find those pockets.
So radius of course is easier to do, but it's not going to get you the information that
you need.
So let's remove that radius.
All you got to do is click the X there, click on location.
You can scroll and show all areas, right?
And you can start selecting areas that you want to go.
Now, this isn't just for large Metro areas.
This is for anyone.
You will find the 80% of your clients come from 20% of your locations or approximately,
okay?
What you need to do is you want to figure out what those 20% of your locations are.
And you want to put the majority of your budget, probably 80% of your budget goes to those
locations.
Good example is I had a client, a very short-lived client because he had a thousand dollars a
month to spend and he was trying to target the entire island of Manhattan, New York.
Now the entire is about 1.6 million people.
He had a small, one person business and he thought he could service the whole area.
And my request was, "You need to pick two or three zip codes.
There's more than enough business there and you also don't want to spend half your time
driving across town when you could get the majority of your clients within a few miles
of your location."
And his argument was, "I already service this area.
I want to go after that area."
And I said, "If you service this area, do you serve every single client?"
And he said, "Well, no."
And I said, "That's what you want to consider.
I understand that you may have a lot of business in one area, but you want to expand.
The ways that you expand are you get more clients.
It doesn't matter where they come from.
But if you know that you have a good pocket of clients in one location, double down on
it because never has one business said that they had every single client."
Get my drift?
So let's show you inside some real accounts.
Here's one that we're targeting different zip codes in the Minneapolis area.
As you can see, there are pockets that are missing now.
We've actually taken those pockets out and you might say, "Well, why would you do that?"
What's happened is we've gone into an account that looks like this.
Now to get to that screen, once inside your campaign, all you do is click on the left
side and go to locations.
And here, you will see all your clicks and your costs, and your conversion data.
As you can see, this campaign has 175 conversions, but what we want to do is we want to weed
out locations that aren't converting, or even locations where our ads aren't showing.
Now we've gone in and we've select some of the cities, but we've also selected a bunch
of zip codes.
So let's scroll down here.
I've sorted this by conversions.
Let's go down and you can see there's a lot here that don't even have any clicks, or if
they have clicks, they've spent a lot of money without a conversion.
Okay?
So there's a lot of locations here.
We spent $106 here, $167 here with no conversions, right?
$51 42, but all that adds up.
So what we did was, we are going to go in here and we're going to click on the areas
number one, that don't have any clicks.
And if they have spent a bunch of money, like over a hundred dollars, we're going to kill
these locations because Google will automatically funnel that money back into our other locations
that are performing better.
So we want to take out the bad locations.
So I clicked a bunch here.
And then all we do is we go up and we click edit and we hit remove.
Remove 22 locations.
Click on confirm.
Now, you're going to see the map, make a change here, see what happened there.
It got rid of this location, some over here, one here and a bunch down here because those
locations were not converting well.
So now, this map starting to look like this one.
Now this one is performing a lot better because we have literally taken approximately 30%
of the budget that was showing in these areas but wasn't converting, and now we're putting
it into locations where it's serving better, where we're getting more clients for that
same budget.
So once again, rather than going after this whole area, we are going to go after specific
sections.
All right.
Now, what else I would suggest is if you're a smaller company, once again, budget under
a thousand dollars a month for ads, I would start small and then expand.
If you start small and you're not getting a lot of clicks, then what you can do is you
can start to expand your locations.
It's much easier to get that data by starting with a spool of locations like this, and then
saying, "Okay, we're not getting clicks.
After a week, maybe 10 days, we're not getting a lot of clicks.
Let's expand it a little bit."
We can either add keywords to that, those specific locations.
Or you can say, "Let's add another zip code in here and one in here, right on the edges."
And start to figure out where your best pocket of clients is coming from.
Some other big mistakes that I see people doing is they're like, "Well, we want to target
the entire United States, we have a $700 a month budget."
Big mistake.
You're going to get one click from Maine, one click from California, one from Florida,
one from Washington.
It's going to take you months or years to come up with enough data to figure out where
your pocket of clients is.
So what I would say is, start in where your two or three best states are, performers.
Go there.
I had a client when it came to location targeting, they were a swimming pool company and they
wanted to target the entire United States.
And I said, "Well, where are majority of your sales?"
They're like, "Well, in the Southern US."
I'm like, "That's probably where you want to concentrate because obviously, nobody buys
an outdoor pool in Minnesota in the middle of winter."
So a lot of this is just common sense.
You don't want to target the entire country if the majority of your sales come from three
states.
Go where your business is.
As you make more sales, as you get more money, you can put some of those returns back into
your campaign and grow it that way.
Then you can start expanding to other states.
But don't just say, "I want it all."
No matter how good you are, you'll never get all of it, but if you go where the business
is, you can get an even bigger chunk.
And when it comes to location targeting, Google is very good about finding those pockets of
people.
And if you put more money to it, you will get more sales.
Another quick tip, in location options, click on this presence, people in or regularly in
your targeted locations.
This is because I don't want people outside of that area to be clicking on my ads.
If you take the recommended target, what happens is Google will say, "All right, well, if somebody
is in New York, but they're looking for Minneapolis and they happen to pull up your ad, they can
click your ad."
I only want people who live there looking for this particular service.
So click on that.
Another tip, go into advanced search.
And what I tend to do is I go add locations in bulk.
I will add all the states.
I want to make sure I'm not wasting any of my budget.
And occasionally you'll go in there and you will start to see that your budget, you might
get a click from New York or Florida and you're a businesses in Minnesota.
You're like, "Why is that?"
Sometimes it slips through the cracks.
So I go and I will list all the other states I'm not doing business in.
I will click search.
North Dakota, I want to exclude.
Wisconsin, I want to exclude.
Iowa, I want to exclude.
So what I've done here is I'm starting to exclude other states.
And I will exclude every other state that I am not in.
I want to make sure that my budget is all going to my location.
Now, obviously we didn't go through every aspect of this, but these are just some of
the biggest mistakes that we see when we go into people's Google ads location settings.
So make sure you take a look at this.
We've had clients say that they've gone in and they thought they had their location settings
correct and then they turn their ads on and they're not really paying close attention
and they realize that their ads are targeted to the entire United States and not just to
one metro area.
And they spent a lot of money.
So keep a very close eye on your location settings, especially at the beginning of a
campaign.
Make sure that you're not getting clicks from, sometimes other countries.
Because sometimes when you enter the zip code, it might pull a code from another country.
Our zip codes sometimes will pull up locations in France.
You got to make sure that you've got the right location.
So do you have any horror stories about location settings?
Have you had any mistakes that have cost you?
If you have any of those, leave them down in the comments section below.
No judgment, but sometimes these errors will help somebody else keep from making that same
mistake.
And if you like Google ads videos, do me a favor, hit that subscribe button and that
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And over to the right-hand side, you will see some more related Google ads videos.
Thanks so much for watching.
Hope to see you next time.