The Locations Tab
Precisely controlling the geography of who can see your ads is a very important part of creating campaigns that perform well. Clicks from locations that can't buy from you, or are unlikely to buy from you, is one of the biggest mistakes users make with SEM.
When starting out, it is a very good idea to test your new campaign in very specific locations. One city or even one zip code is recommended. Let's quickly review the reasons you want to start with a smaller, well-defined marketplace of "locations", rather than simply let the campaign run all across the US.
- Your market is limited - you'll be paying for clicks from places that can't buy from you.
- You might end up getting a lot of clicks before you've really engineered your campaign and landing page to take advantage of them. Start small and see what happens.
- Your market is not uniform. You want to customze your campaign for specific states, cities, or zipcodes. This includes different ads, different budgets/bids, or different landing pages.
In Ads/Editor, geographic markets are set at the campaign level only by choosing a location or set of locations (cities, states, zipcodes, or country). The default location for campaigns is the US. Click the “edit” button to open the market locations editor, then you can select which type of locations. If you select cities or zip codes, you can then choose to see the 100 closest to a particular zip code that you enter or the100 largest within a state or the US. (See footnote.)
Locations within Google Ads/Editor have an associated reach statistic - which is Google's estimate of the number of people seen on Google properties within the specified geographic area
- Click "Edit" to make changes to your locations
- Choose states to select one state or a set of states
- Select "city" to choose one city or create a set of cities
- Choose between a list of the largest cities within a state (or the US)
- Or a list of cities that are closest to a particular zipcode you enter
- Select "Zip" to choose a set of zipcodes to define your market
- Edit location settings
