Best Strategy and Tips for Local AdWords

Google AdWords is one of the best tools for driving traffic to a website quickly. But it can be a money-pit.

We want to find the perfect balance between getting traffic and not spending too much money. One way is to ensure that you are advertising the best geographical area. This article gives some tips on local AdWords. 

Be where your customers are - or where they want to be

If you're setting up an AdWords search campaign for a local business, you don't want to waste money by advertising to a broad geographical area. You want your ads to show locally.

For example if you are an independent estate agent in Kingston, you want your ads to show in your local town. So the tempting option is to use AdWords' geographical targetting tools. These allow you to set the areas where your ads will show - whether that be a country, city, radius around a point, or combination of all.

Your keywords would be "houses for sale", "flats to rent" etc. However, you may be missing a trick. What about all those people outside your local area who are searching for properties to buy or rent in your town using geo-terms such as "kingston houses for sale"? A geo-targetted campaign will not show ads to this group, therefore missing a whole section of your market.

One answer is to use a second campaign, targetted at the widest possible geographical area (perhaps UK for example) but using keywords such as "kingston houses for sale", "flats in kingston" etc. We find this "two-sided" approach to work best in most situations. It takes a little more setup work but gets far better results. Using the AdWords geo-targetting tools to target all of Surrey and 20 miles around Guildford.

Advanced tips:

1. If you want to use geo-targetting across campaigns you can create a "shared" geo-area including place names to target using the "Shared library", and then apply this to multiple campaigns. Changes made to this shared area will be reflected across all your campaigns.  This is done using a template spreadsheet available to download from Google AdWords.
2. Think about where your customers are more than where you are. For example it's common in estate agency for customers to move from one specific town to another. Advertise in the location where they are likely to be coming from.
3. You can exclude geographical areas too - an example might be if you are based in Richmond, Surrey, and don't want clicks from people in Richmond, Yorkshire (or the other way around!)
4. Think about where your ideal customer is located. Our chartered surveyor client is based in Guildford but their most profitable clients are in Twickenham, Richmond or along the A3 corridor which is quick and easy to drive to. AdWords geo-targetting makes it really easy to set this up.

UKcentric is a London AdWords agency helping customers to save money whilst getting more customers via the AdWords programme.