Geofencing is an excellent way to communicate with your customer base in real time. Most brick-and-mortar stores now realize that mobile devices can serve as the marketing bridge between online and offline. Geofencing is the most basic entry into the world of location.
How to Set up Geofencing
To set up geofencing advertising with Google Ads, select the campaign you’d like to manage. Then, go to the campaign Settings. The Google Ads platform allows you to geofencing on search, display, and Youtube campaigns. If you’ve chosen the geofencing in Google Ads, there are quite a few options.
Geofencing Location Targeting
A Country, State, City, DMA, Metro, Zip Code, and Radius. You’ll want to pay attention to the exclusions. In Google Ads, geofencing and geo-targeting are called Location Targeting. Geofencing with Google Ads should help your quality score by serving more relevant ads to local users.
Once you select Locations, you can expand the geofencing options in the Google Adwords campaign. Your top geofencing and geo-targeting options are the following:
- All countries and territories
- United States and Canada
- United States
- Enter another location
For most local geofencing advertising campaigns, select the option of entering a location. Then, you can use the search feature to start typing in a location to target. The tool will give you options that match the location you searched for.
In the following example, searching for Dallas brought up several options: it returned a match, as well as the possible Reach for each of those geo-targets. But, what is reach? Reach, in Google Ads, is the estimate of how many people are nearby. This takes into account the target and excluded locations in the geofence as well as the geo-targeting settings in your campaign.
Geofencing Radius Targeting
To select advanced geofencing options, select Advanced search. Once you select advanced search, you can select to add or exclude geography based on your selections. If you exclude a location in your targeting, then your ad will not serve to people in the exclusion settings.
The Radius targeting options in Google Adwords are either by the number of miles or kilometers around a location.
When I’m running a campaign that has extremely tight geofencing or geo-targeting settings, I prefer to select a kilometer radius instead of a mile radius to have tighter location targeting. To choose radius targeting, select the Radius option on your geotargeting. In the example screenshot, I’m doing a one-kilometer radius around my physical location which is downtown in the small city of Shreveport, LA.
For a Lawyer or Law Firm, this type of targeting can be very helpful if you’re running display ads around a hospital. So, the number of ways to leverage this tight geolocation targeting is endless. Learn more about our adwords management.
