How Can I Target Certain Countries in Google AdWords without Excluding Other Countries?

[Instabill]

So, here is the situation:

Our company works with merchants worldwide (with the exception of those who live in excluded high-risk countries--mostly in Africa), but most of our Google AdWords leads come from Indian merchants.

My CEO wants our campaigns to convert leads from other countries (i.e., the UK, Germany, US, Canada, Australia, etc.), but I have no idea how to do that without excluding India. However, my CEO does not want to exclude India from our AdWords campaigns as the leads are profitable. We simply want more diversity with out leads in terms of geographic location.

I am sure there are resources on the Web about how to do this, but I am not an Adwords expert and am unsure of what phrases to search to find the answers.

Direct advice or helpful links are much appreciated.

Regards,
Meghan

[john4math]

Just my 2 cents, but if you're not going to tune the ad text by location, this is precisely why Google has spent so much time creating these new enhanced campaigns.  As the campaign runs, you can still see geographic-based reporting if your campaign targets different countries.  But instead of creating different campaigns, you'd set bid adjustments for different locations to adjust the CPCs by region.

This makes the reporting marginally harder (you can still see this data in the dimensions tab), but if you're not going to take advantage of ad text by region, I think this is easier.  Mainly because when you make changes to these campaigns (add/remove ad groups, keywords, ad text), you're going to have to remember to duplicate these changes across all the campaigns you've spawned.  Also, when you want to start adding demographic and remarketing lists to your search campaigns (coming soon - currently in beta), you'll have to set that up and manage those bid adjustments for each of these campaigns as well.

[Branden_S]

Hi Meghan,

If you want to change bidding by location, you will first need to add lots of cities to your campaign.  Then let the campaign run for a while, so you can accumulate data for each city.  Once you have clicks & conversions for several cities, you will be able to make decisions about conversion rates for each city.  Does this make sense?

After time goes by and you have enough data, just click on the campaign >>  settings>>>  locations.  Do you see the column 'bid adjustment"?  This is where you +/- bids for that location.

Branden

[Instabill]

Branden and John,
You both provided very helpful information. However, I think I will start with Branden's simple advice on creating separate campaigns to target countries using the same ads and keywords.

I will take some time to explore the bid-setting by location and see if I can make sense of it. I am primarily a content writer, so the marketing and technical aspect of AdWords is fairly new to me.

Thank you both so very much for your help!

Regards,
Meghan

[Branden_S]

If you want to keep things simple, just go into settings and add more countries to your targeted locations.  However if you want to be able to control separated budgets & bids for each country, I recommenced that you have separate campaigns for each country.  Just create a new campaign, copy/paste your current keywords & text ads into the new campaign.  This will allow you to have separate budgets & bids for each country, which should result in better performing campaigns.   I also recommend that you exclude countries that you are not targeting (both the high risk countries you mentioned, and other countries that you do not want to target).

If you want to make your campaign perform even better, I recommend that you take advantage of the enhanced campaigns 'bidding by location'.  This will allow you to +/- bids based on location.  For example if you have a higher conversion in 1 city, you will want to increase keyword bids in that city.  To be able to achieve this, you need to be targeting lots of cities, not just the entire country.  It will take some time to add all of the major cities in a country, but this will allow you to +/- bids for each city, which is a major improvement.

[john4math]

You can include or exclude locations in the campaign settings within Adwords.  If there's a significant lead volume from India, and want to tune ads directly to them, you could duplicate your campaign(s) and geotarget them to India specifically, to get higher CTRs from those ads.  If you've upgraded to enhanced campaigns, you can do bid adjustments by location too, to easily adjust your CPCs by location.

The Adwords help article is here.  We usually refer to it location targeting or geotargeting if you want to search for it.