Clicks Can’t Hide Anymore

By Erica Barth, Paid Search Supervisor, Advertising Solutions

Ever wonder if those geo-modified keywords were really targeting the right consumers? Now you can find out. Google’s new Geographic Performance report allows you to easily analyze your Google performance data by city, DMA, state or country at an account, campaign or ad group level. Similar information can be found via Google’s Insights for Search tool for specific keywords, but I think it’s particularly interesting to also analyze your client’s specific performance data within this context.

For instance, one of my clients is targeting the Latino market within the U.S. and Puerto Rico with Spanish language campaigns. While I knew we were targeting Puerto Rico with our geo-targeting as well as some geo-modified keywords, I and the client were surprised to discover that almost 15% of our traffic was coming from Puerto Rico.

This new reporting features allows us to start to analyze the consumer behavior differences between various markets across the country and start to answer questions like, “In Miami, are consumers more likely to refer to a ‘car’ as ‘carro’, ‘auto’ or ‘coche’”? Or, “Which markets are driving the most traffic to our site?”

In this client’s particular case, insights into these questions can help guide decisions and strategies in other areas. Understanding consumer behavior by market can allow their other agencies to better target their messaging offline and online. Or in areas of the country where search demand is high or our ads are particularly relevant, the client can have their sales team target efforts to focus on these markets.

For many clients where we have access to a web analytics package, this information can still be hard for us to slice by referring source (e.g. paid search vs. organic search), let alone by campaign or ad group. And in many instances, we don’t have access to this information at all (as in this particular case).

With the geographic reporting and other tools that are becoming available every day, it’s exciting to see how we can take the knowledge we are learning from Search and not only improve our Search campaigns, but analyze it in such a way that overarching insights can help guide our clients overall strategy and business decisions.