Clone City/Zipcode Campaigns

The way to get conversions (most effectively) is to target the most relevant searches from the people most likely to buy (or convert for some value). What you may not realize, is that the use of a location (city or zipcode) can often be a big piece of relevance for many searchers who are looking to buy. Location relevance is as important as the relevance of any other terms.

So if your customer typed in: Emergency plumbers in 53202, your campaign specifically targeted for 53202 will have a significant advantage over all the campaigns targeting that search that are not specifically for 53202. Your keywords are much more specific so they are going to be less expensive clicks. Your conversion rate will be higher because buyers use zip or city in their searches more than non-buyers.

There is often a feeling that, because you can serve anyone in the country, you don't need to think about customizing your campaign for particular locations. Even if your customer is excited that you do plumbing or law everywhere throughout the US, you still have to deal with the fact that your ad will be showing to a potential customer in a specific location.

The specific location where your customer lives or does business.

This can extend all the way to particular towns and villages and suburbs. For example: the city of Chicago has over 200 suburbs. Most Google advertisers use "Chicagoland" type ads. If you create ads targeted at specific suburbs, you might enjoy a significant performance advantage. Especially when your customer uses the actual suburb name in their search. Many of those suburbs contain over 20,000 people each.

To see if this approach can improve your SEM performence, just create one campaign targeting a particular zipcode or city. Then create keywords and ads that highlight that zipcode or city and see if you are able to clicks from searches that use the specific zipcode or city. This includes searches that expressly mention the location and searches that don't (near me, for example). The important thing is that your campaign is set to run only in the specific zipcode or city AND that your ads display that location prominently.

How will you repeat that for all the zips or cities in your market? There are 33,000+ zip codes and 16,000+ cities that you can target in Google in the US alone. Even to pick a particular market area, you might be looking at dozens or hundreds of values. And geography is handled at the campaign level. So to customize your ads and keywords for each location will require a separate campaign.

CampaignBuilder has features which handle this need. This section of the docs will take you through the five steps. Once you have a campaign you want to clone, it will only take you a few minutes to create as many cloned campaigns as you want to run.

We created Example #5 so that you could see and use a complete set of zipcode-based campaigns created for a (fictitious) emergency plumbing service provider who markets to people searching by zip code. The example is set up with one zipcode around Milwaukee, WI (53202).

To make changes to the example, copy the example to one of your project lists 

For example, you can choose 5 zipcodes and create the 5 associated campaigns (see below). Then view how the keywords and ads have been customized for each zipcode value. This example uses the two features you will need in order to clone a campaign for a set of zipcodes or cities.

To take full advantage of the ability to create a separate campaign for each city or zip code, you can customze your keywords and ads using the [location] variable. Simply put, wherever you put the value: [location] in your keywords or ad text, CampaignBuilder will substitute the correct value of city or zipcode for the campaigns it creates.

A keyword value of: Hot Pizza in [location] will result in creating a keyword of: Hot Pizza in Chicago. (within the campaign created for Chicago). The same will be applied to any text with the [location] variable in any expanded text ad fields or responsive search ad fields or call ad fields.

For our example using Milwaukee area zip codes, let's see how to use this to customize our keywords and ads. Remember, we have selected five zip codes to use to create five separate campaigns to target each zip code for maximum relevance. Especially for searchers who use the zip code in their search terms.

Sync works for projects that contain sets of city or zipcode campaigns. Go to Review, then Sync. Click the download ECF button.

Open Editor. Type cmt-I (Account-File Import), select your ECF in your downloads folder, then review the imported campaign set in Editor.