Differences in Bid Costs?

I'm wondering if there is a difference in cost per click if you are bidding on keywords in a national/international campaign vs. regional/local campaigns. For instance, if I want to advertise for the word "widget," is the cost I am paying higher/lower/same if I use the word in a national campaign vs. one targeted specifically to, say, Seattle consumers?

Basically, I'm trying to figure out if there is a cost advantage to using geographic targeting with Google Adwords?

I'd appreciate any thoughts on this. Is anyone else dealing with this issue?

CPC will vary depending on how many other advertisers have ads running for the individual searches made online.

All ads running nationally will appear at the same time for any running regionally, so bids could actually be higher (or position lower) in different areas.

Ideally, geographic targeting would be most useful to localized businesses that only want to advertise in a particular area.

Unfortunately, Google can determine the location of only a small percentage of Internet users so to truly reach any market it is necessary to advertise nationally.

Geotargeting works better in some areas than others, probably due to differences in popularity of various ISPs. For example, there is far more local traffic available in California than Texas.

When I set up regional advertising, I run two campaigns: 1 regional and 1 national. My regional campaign has all my general terms "swamp land", "swamp real estate", etc. My national campaign uses the regional specific terms combined with the general terms "california swamp land", "Los Angeles swamp real estate", etc.

Most of the time, my regional campaigns do perform better than my national campaigns with higher CTR's and lower bids.

More and more regional companies who were afraid to use ppc in the past are starting to jump on board now with great success. Examples: Consultants and IT companies that service a small area of a city or state, small campgrounds that depend on same state/short trip travelers, education companies certified for licensing in a few states, etc.

That doesn't surprise me; however, you may be missing the majority of all of your potential traffic by doing that. How much depends on your location.

The reason for that is simply that the majority of searchers do NOT specify any location modifiers in their searches.

Both a regional campaign and a national campaign modified by location ARE going to have higher CTRs, lower bids, and better conversion than a more broad national campaign.

However, until searchers learn to do more complex and advanced searches the only way to get your ads in front of most of them is to run less targeted campaigns.

You do want to ensure that the location is in the title to control unwanted clicks. There is a trade-off involved in doing this of increased traffic vs increased costs so you will want to start conservatively and monitor ROI.

I've started a new thread regarding the current limitations of Geo-targeting.

Yes, the first search might be something like "campground" but most people will realize that they just brought up a bazillion unrelated results so their NEXT search will be more focused and include "austin campgrounds" or "texas campsites". Same example for real estate: what good does it do to search for "lake homes" when searching "Austin lake homes" or "Lake Travis lakefront property" will bring better results?

I used to do computer training courses and a few years back, people didn't know how to search the Internet and you had to teach them how...there are still a lot of people out there that don't do a very good job at searching but I'm finding that these days people are becoming more intuitive with their searches.

In my experience with regional and non-regional ppc accounts, we now pay less money and get less traffic but we get more sales/leads/reservations from regional advertising than we ever got from our national campaigns. I don't believe in billboard PPC advertising where you throw your ads in front of everyone and hope someone will need what you have to offer. I believe in focused advertising and I get results from focused advertising.

I absolutely agree that some have the wisdom to search again with a location modifier. And that focused advertising provides the best results.

It will be great when more people learn to do targeted searches. I still don't understand why search engines do not prompt them for locations.

Probably every search engine has an "advanced search" offering; however, many still are not aware of it.

For advertisers in some states, regional advertising at Google may be enough. In others, if you don't advertise nationally there just isn't enough traffic.

Here's an actual example for an advertiser in Texas:

Regional clicks last month 118
National clicks last month 273

They are bidding low and could increase clicks if they were willing to increase bids. This is more regional traffic than there used to be; however, it is still low compared to national clicks.

The added traffic is important to them. All of their ads have their location in the title and are well down the page to limit non-relevant clicks.

Since they are not in ecommerce there is no accurate comparison of ROI for national vs regional.

One thing is known. There are many AOL users, at least some of them are buyers, and none of them will see regional ads.

There is no one best way to set up Google AdWords for everyone. Location, product, service, demographics, budget, etc....all factor into the success of a Google account and into the best way to set it up.

My best regional clients are in high traffic states like NY, NJ, CA, TX, FL. There are others that do well depending on what they offer.

Over the last couple of days, I've had several conversations with clients and potential clients about how quickly the Internet changes and my belief is that the next change will be more geared towards the regional/local market. It's moving that way now but I think there will be entirely new technology and shifts in advertising soon that will greatly impact how people market on the Internet.

Yes, advertising is far more complex than many are aware. Just as I advise not using content or display until you're taking all the search traffic there is, if you can get all the traffic you want regionally that will often provide a higher ROI than running ads nationally.

I do see good regional traffic particularly in California and on the east coast. Texas regional traffic has been disappointing for many of my clients.

Like you , I believe we will see advances in better online targeting and more localized offerings such as the SuperPages PPC program.

I wonder when the regional shift will begin. Since November of 2003 research has shown that 25% of searches are local in nature. However back in November 2004 I was seriously looking into advertising on a local level with the two major IYPs (Internet Yellow Pages) for my area. The numbers didn't impress me so I didn't advertise. Because I was studying local search in depth at that time, I drew the conclusion that the local market wasn't mature enough, i.e., not enough advertisers focusing on local search and not enough consumers doing the same. Good not-so-recent case in point -- you could type in "online marketing solutions" (or something like that) along with my zip code and see me on the first page of Yahoo's search results through my (free) listing in Verizon's SuperPages. Big deal. I've never received one call from it.

The issue as I see it is simply that people do not seem to think beyond their own location/life and the solution providers have not stepped in sufficiently to lead them to the information they're seeking.

Perhaps they think searchers will become more sophisticated. That is not happening quickly enough nor will all searchers ever understand or change.

There aren't enough advertisers focusing on local search primarily because there isn't currently a place to buy substantial amounts of local traffic.

Even though traffic is low, I would still encourage advertisers to buy whatever they can. Someone searching locally for a specific item or business in a yellow pages type format is far more likely to convert.

I don't see "online marketing solutions" as something I would necessarily look for locally. Online providers can be anywhere - they don't need to be local so why would I search locally for one?

Really good information here. How effective do you consider Google's country specific targeting to be? I would think it far easier to detect the location of ISP's by country, but still not perfect. What is your experience?

Most of the clients I run ads for advertise primarily in the U.S. Traffic is less in Canada and the U.K.

When you run campaigns in multiple countries at once you cannot tell from within Google how much traffic comes from each.

I suspect that AOL users in other countries appear to be in the U.S. so some of the same limitations to determining locations will apply at the country level.

Many of the largest ISPs are International so their traffic may appear to originate in a different country than the actual user.

One other point that many may not realize is that searchers in other countries may choose to use the U.S. based Google search instead of their own country Google. If they do they are probably going to see U.S. ads.

Thanks for that last point in particular flyingrose, that is well worth considering. I myself am living proof, I live in Canada and yet I always use the .com Google myself for searching.

You'd be a good tester for this concept. When you use the google.com site do you see Canadian ads only, U.S. ads only, or a combination of both?

For the same reason that most people look local to begin with. It goes back to the old logic that people tend to prefer to do whatever they do within 50 miles or so of where they live. People still like to see the person they're doing business with. Obviously not in every case -- but preferably.