If you’ve been advertising online for any amount of time at all, you will no doubt be aware that much of the PPC advertising you see (and will have placed) is keyword driven. You will also no doubt know how saturated and expensive some keywords are to use. Plus, to get any sorts of results at all, you have had to resort to the longest of longtail keywords, each bringing in very little traffic.
As the name suggests, PPC advertising means you pay when somebody clicks on your ad, regardless of what they happen to do next, so you want to make sure that every click counts. There are, however, other tactics that you could use to potentially get better results from your online advertising. As well as concentrating on certain keywords, you can also concentrate your advertising efforts on very specific areas, through a process known as geotargeting.
How Small Local Businesses Can Use Geotargeting
The first and most obvious place where geotargeting can be used is with small local businesses. This is particularly true if you are the type of single-location traditional bricks and mortar establishment that offers a service or product that cannot be sent large distances, such as a hair stylist, or a car repair business. You don’t want your advertising shown in areas where customers can’t make a trip to your business.
By using geotargeting for your PPC campaigns, you can concentrate your advertising to a small radius of maybe 5 to 10 miles around your location, so that you are not wasting money showing PPC ads to people that have no intention or the ability to visit your store in person.
How Much Larger Businesses Can Use Geotargeting
Of course, not all businesses are small or in a single location, and there are two ways in which large businesses can use geotargeting to help increase their profits. It is not uncommon for larger businesses to have more than one location, say for instance if you are a chain restaurant. In this case, rather than just relying on generic brand-driven advertising, you could personalise ads to show the location of the restaurant nearest your potential customer at any given time.
Another solution is to use it to personalise ads. In a world that is largely anonymous and impersonal, people tend to respond better to personalised advertising. In the same way, open rates tend to be higher for an e-mail with the recipient’s name in the subject line, you could suggest that people who live in a certain location could benefit from your product or service. Plus, seeing the name of their hometown is likely to catch the potential customer’s attention.
To Wrap It All Up
Many businesses like yours are looking for ways to make their PPC advertising more effective (and possibly more cost-effective as well). Targeting all the right keywords is one strategy but combining that with something like geotargeting can be even more beneficial. This means that your advertising is only shown in the precise area of your business, or to personalise an ad so it attracts your customer’s attention in a sea of impersonal brand-driven advertising.
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