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Properly Utilizing Geo Targeting for Maximizing Your ROI.
In this thread, we will examine in great detail how you can properly utilize geo targeting for display advertising campaigns, so you will get the most out of your advertising funds. Proper utilization of geo targeting can often be the difference between a profitable and unprofitable campaign, and I'm speaking from personal experience of testing out various campaigns on the Bonadza platform.
Media Buying
Lets say you’re promoting an offer targeted for the major English-speaking countries, which you’re trying to advertise to the appropriate online audience. You hand-pick the sites you deem relevant to your offer, and narrow the geo targeting for the single campaign to US, UK, CA and AU, enter the appropriate bids, and start the campaign.
A lot of advertisers tend to clump all the countries into one campaign. The problem with such practice is that you’re not getting the most out of your advertising funds. Do not clump the 4 geographic all regions into one campaign. Branch the campaigns into 4 separate campaigns, one for each region. There are a few reasons to do this:
Bidding Flexibility
Bids vary from one country to another if you put an universal bid for all countries, you’ll have no idea what exactly is going on, and whether you’re overbidding or underbidding for a certain country. By splitting your campaigns, it is much easier to determine the bid amount for each country, and being always in control.
Tracking
You will be able to get detailed tracking reports for each country, and be aware of exactly how your campaign is performing in a particular region
Performance
The CTR and the conversions rate can also vary significantly from one geographical region to another. Just because all countries are English speaking, doesn’t mean that the target audience will react the same. It’s quite the contrary, you are likely to have a significant difference in campaign performance depending on the geographic region. Depending on the vertical and your target audience, the difference can be night and day from country to country,even though you’re using the same/similar creatives for all regions.
Basically, you’re going to get a much better grasp on what is performing well for you, and what is not this way. Furthermore, you’ll know which parameters of your campaign to eliminate in order to increase your ROI, and get the most of your online advertising budget.
In certain occasions, branching out your geographical campaigns into several smaller campaigns rather than clumping them together, can be the difference between a positive ROI, and a negative one. This principle is universal for all traffic sources, I recommend that you apply it when you’re advertising with Bonadza, and the other advertising networks, and you’ll notice the benefits. Take a look at the following chart to get a better idea of what was being discussed:
Once you branch out your campaign to several geo targets like described in the first half of this thread, there are several ways to boost your campaign performance on your branched geo campaigns. Let’s say you’re promoting a credit report offer aimed for the major English speaking countries and you are targeting UK,CA,US and AU for your campaigns.
Instead of running a generic credit report banner, saying stuff like “get a free credit report” along with some other information, there’s something you can do which might yield a much better campaign performance.
Carefully analyze everything that you know about your target group, and use as much of it to your advantage!
In this case, we know the geographical region where the audience is. How do we use this info to boost our campaign performance? One way to do it, would be to first create a separate creative for each country, and make the creative more targeted for the audience. A very simple thing to do is to add a flag or multiple flags of the targeted country on the creatives, and mention the country in the creative text.
So for the UK creative, you could add a UK Flag, and say something like “Best Free Credit Report in the UK” along with some additional info. This, in many cases would stand out much more, than the generic creative without the flags and the country name, however this ad is still a bit generic, so we need to make it even more interesting.
This is not where it ends, you could take it a step further, and even include local dialects and slang in the geographic region you’re targeting. For example, for the UK Creative you could do something like “Improve Your UK Credit Report in a Chivvy, before you finish a delightful cup of tea?“. Although this text is a bit of stereotypical and a bit humoristic, it stands out from what most ads show, and is likely to get a better response than the generic ads.
The moral of the story is – the more you use the information you know about your audience, the better, and this is for all the info you know about your audience, not just the geographical region they’re located in. Things like, age, gender, interests, social status, income, are also something you need to take into consideration in case you have that kind of info available.
Is this strategy always effective?
I have to note, that this kind of strategy might work extremely well particularly with smaller countries and regions, however it might not be effective with bigger regions. So if you slap a US flag on the creative, and add some relevant text, it might not be too effective.
There is a remedy to this. For the bigger countries, you can branch out the campaigns into states. So you divide your campaign into states, and make appropriate creatives. You might get a great CTR in performance in some locations, specifically the smaller ones. Imagine someone seeing “Get a free credit report in Vermont, while you’re enjoying some maple syrup”, there’s a good chance you’ll have a good reaction to it.
Should you divide it into so many regions?
If you divide your campaign into too many sub-regions, there will be some that will yield very little traffic, thus it can be inefficient to create individual creatives for each state. It could be very time-consuming to make creatives for each of the 50 US states.
To counter this, start off with the 5 biggest states/regions in the country. You could target: NY, California, Florida, Texas, Illinois, and make targeted creatives for each. If you’re pleased with your results and want to expand the campaign, continue adding other states.
This strategy is not only viable for the US, but you could also use it for Canada, the UK, and Australia, since we provide Geo targeting to specific sub-regions of these countries as well on our Bonadza platform.
What about targeting your audience even further using geo-targeting?
There is a way to do this, you can geo-target cities in the US. But make sure to select bigger cities have a lot of placements selected for your campaign, or run it RON with geo targetingfor the cities you want, otherwise you might get little traffic
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