Retargeter

Drive the Right Traffic to Your Site: Local Targeting with AdWords

Did you know that you can target local customers online?  With Google AdWords, it’s easy.  Google is brilliant at boosting traffic, especially local traffic. Google allows you to use local targeting to reach specific markets in the U.S., which means you can drive local, targeted traffic to your company website or blog.  This post will explain how to get local traffic, targeted all the way down to the zip code level.

Keep It Local

Unsurprisingly, when it comes to running any business, local advertising campaigns typically receive a very high focus. As more and more people are going online to look for the appropriate information of any business, it will become more and more important to not only target locally but to do so online.

More than 20% of the searches conducted on Google are related to a specific location, and some users even conduct more than 100 local searches a day. A significant percentage of people who conduct these local searches will take action within a day, but some may not take action for weeks.  If you also leverage retargeting, you will be able to take advantage of both.

Target by Zip Code

If you have targeted offline advertising campaigns like direct mail, outdoor ads, or newspaper ads at a postal code level, it will be easy for you replicate that targeting within AdWords. Google has put in place mechanisms that will allow targeting of up to 30,000 different US zip codes within your campaigns

You are able to add up to 1000 zip codes at the same time with the AdWords location target. Plus, you can get feedback on the performance of your local campaigns by viewing campaign performance statistics at the postal code level. These statistics are graded by both the viewers of your local campaign and by AdWords.

Save Time with Local Ads

If you have multiple locations, don’t worry about building each campaign from scratch. To help make the process of creating a custom title easier, Google has developed location insertion for location extensions so you can create text, display URLs, and/or destination URLs for all of your locations at scale. This will eradicate the need for one to make different advertisements for different locations and allow you to have one ad for all the locations where you want to advertise. This new feature automatically inserts the city, phone number, or zip code of your local business into your ad text.

The best advice in local AdWords targeting is to not overdo your targeting, as too much of any good tool can be a bad thing. Enable retargeting for all these campaigns in order to stay in front of your new traffic and bring them back if they don’t convert!

About the Author:

John Rampton is a PPC Entrepreneur, Full Time Computer Nerd, Virtual Tour Guru, Founder at PPC.org & Blogging.org. Find him on Twitter: @JSRampton