Transcript:
Location Targeting
So, what are location settings in Google Ads?
Location targeting settings control who can see your ads based on geography and how Google decides someone is in that location. You’re not just choosing where your ads show. You’re choosing intent versus where they’re physically located. For most local businesses, this is how you prevent paying for clicks from people who are never going to become customers.
What are the different targeting types?
There are five. You can target by country, by state and region, by city, by zip code, or radius targeting. For example, you could put in your business address and target in a 10 mile radius around your business, or five or 20 or 30 or whatever makes the most sense for your business. This one’s really important. Don’t overlook location option settings, and we’ll go over that. There’s two options.
And by default, Google is going to show ads to people who are in, regularly in, or who have shown interest in your targeted locations. That third one’s important. For example, if you own a bakery and choose Phoenix as your targeted location, your ads can show to people who are located in or regularly in Phoenix or to people who have expressed interest in Phoenix bakeries, whether now or in the past.
The second option, the one that most people should use, is you can use the option that only shows your ads to people physically in or regularly in your targeted area. There’s a major difference between those two, and I’ll show you how to do that. Okay, now let’s go over exactly how we can adjust these location targeting settings so they’re just right for you and your needs.
How To Edit Location Settings
How did we get to the screen we’re looking at now?
We want to go to the campaign because you’ll make these changes at the campaign level. Right here, pick the campaign that you want and then over here, look for campaign settings. Click on campaign settings. And now we want to scroll down and look for locations right here. Click that and open it.
Don’t Make This Location Setting Mistake!
And the location options section that I pointed out is right here. And this is the one you want to change. By default, it’s going to be shown as presence or interest. That’s going to be the option. And you can read it. It says people in regularly in or the one you want to get rid of is this who’ve shown interest in your included locations. that tells Google, it gives Google liberties to show your ads essentially to people who are outside of the geographical targeted area that you selected.
So, for example, if you selected just Phoenix, your ads should only target people in Phoenix.
This option will actually give Google the leverage or excuse me, the ability to show ads to people who are actually outside of Phoenix. and you want to switch that in most cases for most businesses to this option. It narrows it to people in or regularly in your included locations. It eliminates this third option where Google can show your ads to people who may have shown interest who are outside of your targeted location area.
So again, in most cases, you want to select presence because this will narrow the scope of your ad showing almost entirely to people who are physically located in the targeted area you selected. In this particular case,
the location being targeted is Phoenix. There are also ways that you can exclude locations. So, it’s not just about adding, but you can also exclude locations. And in this example, there are 33 other locations that have been excluded, including New York, Pennsylvania, Florida, excuse me, zip codes in those areas along with other countries.
Now, where do you go to actually make these changes?
I will show you now. From this same screen, click on advanced search. That’s going to bring up a map on your right and on the left side is where you’re going to make all your changes. So, what the heck are we looking at now? A similar screen. What’s up here shows shows you exactly what’s being targeted. We’re targeting Phoenix. And then down here is the section where you are excluding locations.
And if you can if you click on the location being targeted, watch what happens with the map. It now shows in blue what’s being targeted. If it’s red, it’s being excluded. So, right now, this is what we’re looking at is the map is showing Phoenix as being targeted. Let’s say you want to expand that to Glendale.
And we’re going to add targeting by city. And as we’re typing, Google’s going to start giving you options. And we want to make sure we click Arizona, not California. and watch the map. When I press the include button, it includes a little section of Glendale. Now, let’s say we want to add by state. We’re going to pick the entire state of Arizona. Hit include. And you can see now the map shows the entire state of Arizona being included.
If for whatever reason you made a mistake and you don’t want to include something, just click on the X button here. I clicked on Arizona and the map changed and now it’s only targeting Phoenix and Glendale. Let’s say you wanted to go by zip code. You could add in a zip code
And here you can see just that zip code has been added. You can also do, and this is a common one, especially for service-oriented businesses who maybe only service a certain area around their location, click on the radius button up here. Google will default to 20 miles. You can plug in, you can literally plug in your physical address of your building. You could plug in a city and you or a state and do a radius around that.
What we’ll do is we’ll pick Gilbert, Arizona, where I am at. And we are going to put a 20 mile radius around Gilbert, Arizona. Click on include. And now you can see this circle. That’s the 20 mile radius around Gilbert, which you can see right in the middle. Often times you’ll take a guess and you might look at that and go, “Well, maybe that’s not big enough or that’s too broad and we need to narrow it.” If you want to narrow this, for example, we’ll say to 10 miles because you don’t want to go into the heart of Scottsdale for whatever reason, find the specific targeting.
In this case, 20 miles around Gilbert and click on the pencil icon. And you can just adjust the miles. So, from 10 to 20, click save. And then you can see that that radius has gotten a little smaller.
How To Exclude Locations
Now, let’s say you want to potentially exclude a location and based off your data or feedback or or what you know about your business, you know that targeting people in Scottsdale isn’t a good idea. So, you want to keep the current targeting that you have, Phoenix and this radius, but you want to exclude Scottsdale because it isn’t precise.
There is overlap. Just because technically Scottsdale may start and end here doesn’t mean that the targeting is that precise. There’s going to be overlap. So if there’s areas that are close to your target area that you want to target, but you excuse me that you want to exclude, exclude those in combination with what you’re targeting or what you’re including. So it’s the same process. Plug in the area that you want to exclude.
Oh, excuse me. Never mind.
We need to go back to not radius, but locations. So, click on locations. Plug in the area you want to exclude. And you can see in the dropdown there’s an exclude option. So, instead of include, we’re going to click exclude. So, click on exclude. Take a look at the map. This is Scottdale. And because it’s red, that lets you know that that’s area is being excluded. So, we are now targeting Phoenix, a 10 mile radius around Gilbert, Glendale, and we are also excluding Scottsdale.
And again, this section down here is everywhere, all the locations you’ve excluded. We should be able to scroll and then find Scottsdale has been added to the list. And there it is right there. And so this is an example of of using targeted locations in combination with excluding certain areas which is oftent times a good one-two punch for targeting. And once your settings are the way you want them, click the save button down here.
One last thing, you can also do this in bulk. So, for example, what’s common is you may have a list of, say, 50 zip codes that you want to target. Instead of manually entering those all in at one time, you can click this add locations in bulk. And in this field right here, you could copy and paste in all of the zip codes or the cities that you want to target. We’ll do it as an example right now.
And then what you do is you hit search and then underneath search it has it found Google found both of the zip codes that I put in. And it’s not going to automatically just target them. It’s going to give you the option to target all of them, exclude all of them, or choose one by one.
So, if I were to click target all, you’ll see that they’ll populate down in the location settings below. So, now we’re targeting all of them. And then to keep those changes, click the save button. And you should see all of these options have changed or they’ve been updated accordingly. And then finally, make sure that you click this save button right here in order to save all your edits. And there we go. We have updated our location targeting settings.
That is exactly how you edit your targeted location settings in Google Ads.
Thanks for watching.
