PPC campaign management works best when ad campaigns are structured properly from the outset. This is particularly true for local advertising campaigns. In 2006, I
wrote:
There are two ways to configure a campaign on Google AdWords to engage in local advertising. Read the full article, Local Search Advertising with Google AdWords for details.
A few days ago, the
Yahoo! Search Marketing blog covered this topic. Their
advice:
Over the years, what has proven to work best is to set up separate campaigns with the same group of keywords—one that uses geo-targeting from the user interface, and a second that adds geo-modifiers to the keywords but does not use geo-targeting. This will ensure that an advertiser receives the maximum amount of traffic.
Nice to see Yahoo! in 2009 confirm my 2006 advice. ;-)
Be careful, though, when adopting this PPC campaign strategy on Google AdWords. There's a flaw in Google's expanded implementation of broad matching which I've called
contracted matching. This causes the geo-modifiers to be ignored. As you can imagine, for an ad campaign with national geo-targeting, the results can be disastrously expensive. So, either stick with a single, local advertising campaign or combat
contracted matching in the national campaign via either of these solutions:
- Embedded matches in conjunction with broad matches
- Exact and phrase matches instead of broad matches
For more details, including responses from Google about this matter, read:
Tags:
ppc,
campaign,
management,
local,
advertising
Wow. I've been nominated for a SEMMY Award in the PPC category for this post: 4 Steps to Avoid the Google AdWords Ignorance Tax. I'm pleased that post will garner more exposure as it should help advertisers structure AdWords accounts to save money. In the current economic climate, these kinds of strategies will be important.
