A Complete Guide for AdWords Location Targeting: Setup, Use Cases, and Results

One of the most basic strategies in making your ads relevant is setting up location targeting – determining who sees your ad based on where they are located. It may seem like a basic setting, but there’s quite a bit you can do with it once you understand the business’s specific needs.
And those needs do change. That’s why reviewing your location targeting should be built into your PPC account audit (at least semi-annually, if not sooner based on the need to support immediate business goals).
Let’s take a look at the various ways in which you can target your ads’ locations, and then I’ll share a few strategic examples and a "real world" case study on how location targeting impacted one company’s PPC performance.

AdWords Location Targeting: The Basics

The AdWords platform determines when to show an ad based on a person’s location via an IP address or device location. However, there are also location targeting features that show ads based on interests– for example if a person shows interest in a location they are not physically in.
The latter can be determined by some the following (not an exhaustive list):

• If a person includes a location name in a search
• When a person is searching on Google Maps
• When a person uses a country-specific domain

AdWords may also show ads based on related cities. From the help files (linked to previously):

When you target a city, we may also show your ad to customers in nearby, closely related cities that normally couldn't be targeted because of low population, insufficient data about the geographic area, or because city-level targeting isn't available. For example, if you target the city of Portland, we may also show your ads to searchers in nearby suburbs of Portland.

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