A huge advantage of PPC (pay-per-click) is the ability to customise your campaigns down to the most intrinsic details.
Location is just one of the aspects you can select, either to include or exclude certain locations.
While targeting ‘everywhere’ or the whole city might seem like a great advertising strategy, PPC experts actually do the opposite. For businesses on a tight budget especially, not spending your CPC budget in the right way can actually lower your ROI.
Instead, what we always want to do with any campaign is maximise that ROI.
When it comes to location targeting, here are our top tips on squeezing every penny out of your campaign budget.
Wait, Why Can’t I Target Everyone With My PPC Location Targeting?
Reason 1 – Targeting everyone is extremely expensive and will run your budget down in an instant.
Reason 2 – In most cases, ‘everyone’ is too vague, meaning the wrong people will be clicking on your campaigns and this won’t lead to enough conversions.
Think of this similar to segmentation when sending an email campaign. Segmenting means sending the right message to the right person at the right time.
The reason we also want to be selective with PPC locations is that realistically, some postcodes are going to offer a relevant audience, and others not so.
Consider Your Business Locations Vs The Locations You Can Realistically Serve
Imaginaire is based in Nottingham. If we were to set up a PPC campaign selecting the whole of Nottinghamshire, that would mean advertising to a potential pool of 1,500,000 people.
As a digital marketing agency, we could realistically cater to this entire area. However, for some types of local businesses (i.e. tradespeople or dentists), targeting the location over such a wide area could actually be setting unrealistic goals for both your business and customers.
After all, if you’re a one man band, you might get one customer inquiry from Misson at the top of Nottinghamshire right down to Stanford on Soar in the south. With 62 miles in between these locations, it might not be feasible to serve such a wide location.
Stick To Postcodes Where You Already Have Customers
It might seem counterintuitive to focus your PPC location on postcodes where you already have customers. But unless every potential customer is already a customer, it’s definitely worth pitching in an area where your brand name already has a presence.
While it’s natural to want to cover more ground, it’s also true that more gold could be waiting for you in the same place where your business already serves. This all depends on the types of clientele you are looking to attract vs how many people you currently serve in that area.
Unless your business is super niche and you know for certain no additional customers exist, it’s definitely worth sticking with any winning formulas.
Exclude Pockets Of Areas
If we reverse the analogy we just covered, it can also be helpful to go into your location map and deselect any pockets which are irrelevant.
For instance, an airport may cover a lot of ground on a location map. Yet, for most businesses, it’s unlikely your customers can be found in the airport itself. This is all down to relevance, rather than being distracted by trying to serve your PPC campaigns to the most amount of people, which we know doesn’t work.
So definitely zoom into your map, and keep an eye on it. Deleselecting irrelevant postcodes will then free up your PPC budget which you can put to better use elsewhere in relevant locations.
Imaginaire – PPC Agency Nottingham
On the face of it, PPC might seem like one of the more straightforward digital marketing techniques. However, without expert input, it’s easy to spend your money in all the wrong places. Location targeting (or a lack of) is one such example.
Whether your business is new to PPC or is wanting to improve on any past performance, Imaginaire is here to help. We’re based in Nottingham and work with businesses across the UK and beyond.
Our PPC specialists can be contacted by dropping us a message. You can also give our office a call on 0115 697 1367.