Best Practices for Using PPC for Local Targeting: Kelsey ILM 07

What follows are my perceptions and/or misperceptions of the panel on local search ad targeting at the Kelsey ILM Conference:

Panelists:
Court Cunningham, CEO, Yodle

Brad Geddes, LocalLaunch

Simon Heseltine, Serengeti Communications

Jon Kelly, SureHits

Dorab Patel, Matchcraft

Court Cunningham of Yodle:

Today the average search query has about 4 words in it v. 2 only a couple of years ago. “Tooth Whitening in Austin” v. “Austin Dentist”.

How Yodle optimizes best practices:

1. Understand your market and use terms that are relevant to your market. If you’re targeting dating site users use terms they use like “BBW”.

2. Negative Keywords: If you are a spa and do massages make sure you target “massage” and not “erotic massage” (unless you’re into it).

3. Make sure the text on the page matches the keywords you are targeting.

4. Startout with aggressive bids to get your ad seen and geotargeting. 2/3 of modifiers are city or neighborhood but we are seeing more people using zip codes in search.

5. Track conversions

Brad Geddes, Local Launch

Take best practices for a large campaign and figure how to scale them for a small campaign.

Use long tail targeting to generate cost-effective leads. If you’re a plumber instead of competing against an expensive high volume term like “plumber” target numerous long-tail terms like “broken drain pipe”, “sink installation”, etc. Use the same technique to target geography. Instead of Chicago target a neighborhood like Rogers Park or a zipcode like 60201 (see my post on seo for neighborhood names and state abbreviations).

Simon Heseltine, Serengeti Communications

Showing examples of geotargeting in Google and Yahoo ad systems.

Yahoo has great interface for figuring out geotargeting at a regional level.

Google allows you to target a radius around a fixed point. This doesn’t work well for businesses with small service areas (e.g. under 2 mi radius) so use “DIY” targeting where you can draw an area to target on a map.

Use Keyword Expansion to Geotarget Keywords. For example target “best restaurants in Pleasanton” and “dining in Pleasanton”, etc.

Don’t forget demographics. Different areas have different ways of searching.

Jon Kelly, SureHits
Specializes in financial services search advertising. They need to do geotargeting because of different state by state regulations.
How to do search engine advertising:

1. Calculate Click Value: Conversion x Conversion Value = Click Value

2. Reward The User’s Choices: Make sure the message of the landing page matches the search query/ad copy

3. Watch Your Data: Homonyms can kill you. He did a campaign targeting “mobile home loans” and showed up against search querys for “Mobile, Alabama” which killed conversions.

Dorab Patel, Matchcraft

As relevance increases:

• cost goes up but at some point it decreases (e.g. a very long tail keyword is very relevant but likely low cost)

• volume increases but then decreases

You need balance everything to find the “sweet spot”. Not sure I absorbed everything. Maybe Dorab or Uzi will stop by and provide a bit more clarity?

How narrow can you target in a local community with search ads?

Patel: In Google it’s +-10 miles. The tightest targeting in Yahoo and MSN is DMA.

Geddes: Targeting occurs by where your IP Address is located so it only works about 85% of the time. You need to look at your data and find problems with this targeting and fix it. This geotargeting tends to be more productive than using keyword geotargeting.