One of my absolute favorite attributes of pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns is that you can geographically limit your audience.  Sure, there are more sophisticated features that Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing and Microsoft AdCenter serve up with their respective marketing tools.  However, geographic targeting is definitely one of the most functional.

Geographic targeting allows you to pick the cities, states and countries you want to see your ad.  For example if you own a pizza store in Akron, Ohio you can choose to only show your ad to people searching for “pizza” in Akron, Ohio.  If someone in West Palm Beach, Florida searches for “pizza” they won’t see your ad. (There’s no way you could deliver that pizza in 30 minutes or less!)

Pretty simple.

I have clients who use geo targeting in many different ways:

-          An online retailer who ships only to the lower 48 states excludes Hawaii and Canada from their geo targets.

-          A marketing firm wants to expand from Cleveland, Ohio to New York City and Chicago.  They target these regions and nothing else.

-          A manufacturing firm with a global presence targets North America and Western Europe but excludes less profitable continents.

 If you are an international company, or aspire to be one, geographic targeting by country is important.  You can take it one step further by offering native language ads to searchers.  For example, if you sell your product to both the US and France, you could target those countries and run both English and French ads.  Google can detect that (a) someone is in France (b) is using a French version of their search tool.  Then, Google will display the French language version instead of the English.

Obviously, not everyone speaks English so native language ads are going to definitely help increase click-throughs for that reason.  Less obvious, native language ads show that your business is committed to serving that region or culture (which also increases click-throughs).  I’ve also seen that native language ads tend to be less competitive and much less expensive than their US/English counterparts.

There’s a couple different ways to implement native language ads:

First, you can use Google’s Translator Toolkit.  While quick and easy, there’s the risk of misinterpretation of your keywords and ad copy when using this computer assisted brute force method.

Second, you could hire a native language PPC specialist.  This is probably the optimal solution but not really realistic from a budget and logistic standpoint.  Even if you were to find an experienced Solvenian speaking PPC specialist (good luck!), you’ll pay an arm and a leg.

Third, you can hire a translator to translate your ads and keywords.  That’s what I’ve done in the past with success. 

 It’s not as hard as it seems:

1.       Get an eLance account.

2.       Create a new job opportunity indicating which languages you are requesting.

3.       Upload your existing keywords and ads.

4.       A bunch of off-shore translation (and maybe even a few US ones) companies will bid on your project at super cheap rates.

5.       Pick one with both cheap rates and good ratings.

6.       They do the work.

7.       You pay them.

8.       Create a new Google campaign targeting your regions and languages and upload your freshly translated keywords and ads.

9.       Get lots of click-throughs.

 One thing to keep in mind – there’s line length limitations for ads.  I learned the hard way that Swedish words are really, really, really long.  Make sure you tell the translator up front how many characters they have to work with. 

If you are an international company, you definitely should consider native language ads and geographic targeting.  And even if your company sticks to the good ‘ole USA, geographic targeting can be beneficial to your business.