PPC Tricks: Geographic Location

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising has enormous potential for bringing your website traffic and potential customers.  But PPC is unforgiving and if you are just getting started you are already at a disadvantage – at least on Google AdWords.

Years ago when Google AdWords was still fairly new marketers could get tons of clicks for $0.05 each.  At that price it was pretty easy to make money from PPC.  Honestly, your sales copy would have to terrible and your ad poorly targeted for you to not make money on a $10 product at $0.05 a visitor.  Those people who started years ago have an advantage in Google because they have a long account history.  The marketers with a bad account history are no longer advertising – it’s just too expensive.  The marketers with a good account history are getting cheap (or at least cheaper) ads for every campaign because of that history.

So if you are just getting started in PPC you can’t afford to bid on the obvious keywords like “auto insurance quote” or “lose weight”.  You will pay well above $1 a click for those keywords while well established AdWords uses can get those clicks for much less (how much less changes all the time).  It’s not at all uncommon for Google AdWords newbies to find themselves paying 3, 4, or 5 times as much as the veterans.

You need some tricks to get enough clicks at a cheap price to be profitable while establishing a good account history with Google.  Using Geographic Location or Geo Location in your keywords is one of those tricks.

There are several factors that come into play when determining you cost per click.  Most people focus on Quality Score (QS) for helping control costs.  QS is important because you can control it and a high QS gets you the cheapest click your account history will allow for a given a keyword.  You will pay more for “weight loss” than you will “walmart gift card” because there is a lot more advertisers vying for “weight loss” but if your QS is low you will pay much more per click than you would with a high QS.

However, this hub isn’t about QS it is about Geo Location; the trick here is to pick a cheaper keywords.

Many marketers will advertise on a keyword like “where to buy blue widget” but I know when I really want to buy say a blue widget that my search is “blue widget denver” not “where to buy blue widget”.  If the widget you are searching for is nationally available many marketers are just lazy and they advertise on “where to buy…” which drives the price of that keyword phrase up and up.  But run a search on something like “tennis racquet denver” and you get maps to local stores and maybe a couple of ads on the side.

Only a couple of ads means the competition is low and the keyword won’t be expensive.  Make sure your QS is high and your ad price may be less than $0.10 per click even for a brand new account.  Obviously this will require a lot of customization and there are some tools but it is probably best to do it by hand a few times.  Because the customization can be time consuming I would suggest sticking with the 10 largest cities in the US or using states instead of city names.  So your keywords would be:

·         “blue widget New York”

·         “blue widget Los Angeles”

·         “blue widget Chicago”

Or it could be:

·     “New York blue widget”

·         “Los Angeles blue widget”

·         “Chicago blue widget”

If you are doing all of this manually, I would start by customizing the adcopy you use in Google AdWords for the city and “blue widget” and point all of the ads to a single landing page which is optimized for the “blue widget” keyword.  If your Cost-Per-Click (CPC) is low enough then just wait see how the ads work out before expanding or buying tools to automate the process.