Today we are going to talk about
geotargeting advice with our team.
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Without further ado, let's go ahead and
check out what my team has to say.
- Thanks, Eric.
Hi, I'm Andrew Bloom with Single Grain, and today
I'm talking directly to all marketers who might be running
a geotargeting campaign anywhere in the national U.S.
So that could be a national campaign, or just
a handful of states, anything that has national scope.
And I want you to watch this because you're probably making
a newbie mistake that can really mess up your geotargeting,
that is causing you to reach the wrong people
in the wrong places, and is diminishing
the effectiveness of your bid mods.
And it's going to impact you in your campaigns
regardless of the bidding strategies you've used.
If you're using smart bidding, manual bidding,
scripted bidding, doesn't matter.
This is about how we actually go and target our campaigns.
Not at all about how we adjust them or bid on them.
Recently, we were speaking to a client of ours based in
Canada and they wanted to target all of the U.S.,
but also emphasize particularly large and growing
start-up tech hubs, like San Francisco, California,
Austin, Texas, Provo, Utah.
And they were asking us, well how do we approach this?
Do we target states, do we target these cities?
Now the problem with targeting by states is
you may overshoot, you're speaking to a lot
more people in your target market.
But especially in these start-up hubs,
where you might have a lot of commuters, for example.
If you target by a city boundary definitions,
you might actually be excluding a lot of people
who live outside of your target regions.
You might only be hitting them at work.
Moreover, there's something cognitively dissonant
about targeting by U.S. state boundaries in
digital marketing, these state borders as you see here
behind me, they're artificial, they're not market oriented.
They're usually old.
They're relics of, there was a colony here
or a railroad here and that's how we get
the states that we see.
Instead, we need a map or a schematic for geotargeting
the U.S., carving up the U.S. into regions that
makes sense from a marketing perspective.
So, I'd like you to get familiar with
the geotargeting method that the pros use,
which is the Nielsen DMA Zone Schematic.
Now, instead of 50 states, this schematic actually chops up
the U.S. into 210 individual market regions.
For example, we can zoom in on, let's say Ohio here, and
we can see you're not going to targeting the state of Ohio.
You're going to be going a little bit deeper.
You might want to target Dayton and Columbus,
but not Cleveland, Akron, not Toledo.
It gives you a lot more resolution
than state by state targeting.
Now this has been our preferred method
of geotargeting national campaigns for the last few years.
And especially, here at Single Grain, we've seen up
to a 30% increase in geo optimization efficiency,
just by switching to this method of
geotargeting schematics versus state by state models.
So where do these zones actually come from?
Even though we can target them in Google ads, they're not
at all Google's original invention, or even a new one.
Remember television?
Back in the fifties, Nielsen began surveying households
on their television watching habits and correlated them
with other factors, like market consumption data,
demographic data, and created the first ever,
true marketing map of America.
And they were able to come away with an answer
to the first question of, what are my ratings?
How many people are watching my TV show?
What is my reach of my advertising?
Fortunately, in the digital age, the technology
powering this has evolved considerably, but we
still have the same schematic for geotargeting
that Nielsen developed decades ago.
Now, Nielsen actually partners with Google to provide
these zones in making them targetable
to advertisers free of charge.
So there's no signup, there's no enrollment,
there's no application, it's just there
natively in the platform and you can target it
right now for any of your campaigns.
And this is actually an interesting example of one of the
last few external DMPs that are partnered with Google, that
you don't have to go through a fancy application process
for probably because there's nothing controversial about
these, it's just another way of looking at the map.
So, what are some advantages of using DMA zones
as your primary approach to targeting within the U.S.?
I'm going to give you four.
First, more zones equals more granularity.
Patterns will emerge much more quickly without getting lost
in the weeds if you geotarget deeper versus if you go even
deeper looking at counties, cities, zip codes.
Yeah, you can get technically more precision,
but you're going to be so inundated with data,
you're going to be unable to actually optimize effectively.
The DMA zones are just a nice balance
of size versus precision.
Second, the DMA zones are actually grounded
in marking and consumer data.
The U.S. boundary shapes don't actually represent
inherently meaningful boundaries
between dissimilar consumers.
There's nothing that separates people on
this side of Colorado and this side of Kansas
on this border.
There's nothing inherently different about those people
when it comes to how they go ahead and shop.
But we can actually see Nielsen has found
some overlap regions where there actually
are those differences.
And if you were targeting state by state,
you would miss out on that and you'd
have less precision in your targeting.
So if you're wondering why the DMA zones
are shaped the way they are,
it's because Nielsen knows that's how people consume.
If you're wondering why the U.S. states
are shaped the way they are,
I have an excellent history show channel for you.
Thirdly, targeting the U.S. DMA zones unlocks
more efficient optimization.
The big U.S. states can often conceal dozens
of different competing market trends
that will obscure one another,
and overwrite your data with meaningless signals.
For example, more often than not,
what works in Southern California
isn't the same as what works in Northern California.
East Texas versus West Texas,
rural New York versus New York City.
You're going to want to zoom in deeper
and capture these changes.
These are patterns that you're going to be missing
if you're only looking at an entire US state
based on the map.
And lastly, the Nielsen DMA zones are always updating.
Nielsen updates these regions every two or three years,
in accordance with new data and it revises the maps
to reflect actually new and emerging market behaviors.
Behaviors that might shift these lines one way or another.
Okay, so when does this not work?
When should you maybe choose
U.S. state targeting instead of DMA zones?
Well, very rarely.
But sometimes, we still see digital marketing campaigns
being pegged to traditional marketing campaigns
in some respect.
For example, some advertisers are going to require
that a certain amount of ad dollars
get spent in each region.
Usually to support a team of sales people,
who need to ensure that they all have their own turf,
and it's all treated fairly.
Or for legal purposes, you have to use
a state by state grid to ensure that ad dollars
are going exactly where they are permitted to be going.
This is very frequent in farmer advertising, for example.
And only in those scenarios are you going to
be boxed out of using DMA zone targeting.
Or especially when you wanna just be super sure
that your dollars are going to a state.
Not some complex grid, that someone outside of marketing,
is probably not going to understand.
But beyond that, we have seen DMA zone targeting
be vastly more effective than U.S. state targeting
in virtually every Google campaign that we've run.
So that's my spiel for today.
I hope you've had an interesting revelation
here seeing how the pros do geotargeting.
So, let me know in the comments,
are you going to continue use state by state targeting
for your national campaigns,
or are you going to try out the Nielsen DMA zones?
Love to hear all about it.
If you have any questions,
let me know in the comments,
but, for now, back to you Eric.
- Alright, so I hope you enjoyed that.
Don't forget to leave a comment no matter
what platform you're on.
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and we'll see you tomorrow.