What is geotargeting?
Geotargeting is the process of tailoring marketing content and advertisements based on the customer’s geographic location. It’s often used to target local customers to the organization’s area, but the geotargeted location can be any number of places an organization wishes to target.
Geotargeting is a transformative marketing strategy for businesses with brick and mortar locations and those that deliver goods straight to their customers’ homes. It’s common for organizations to turn to digital marketing services to help ensure their geotargeting techniques are successful.
Types of geotargeting
Most search engines provide a few types of geotargeting specifications marketers can choose from, each dictated by the targeting criteria used. Below are the three most commonly used types:
- ZIP code targeting: Marketers who use this type do so by searching the desired ZIP code and viewing a map of the targeted area. This option is typically limited to locations in the United States.
- Radius targeting: Target a certain radius by typing in a central location and a set range in miles or kilometers.
- Intent or interest targeting: Target users searching for relevant keywords in a specific area.
- Audience targeting: Target ads to people who have visited a category, brand, or location within a particular period of time. Audience targeting is commonly done by using behavioral targeting and including data on both demographics and visitation.
Benefits of geotargeting
Geotargeting is an advertising strategy that helps marketers use their budgets more efficiently. In addition to stretching advertising dollars, geotargeting also results in more clicks and conversions. Key benefits include:
- Maximize advertising budget: When advertisements are targeted toward consumers in hyper-relevant areas, every dollar spent on impressions and clicks is well-spent, making a company’s advertising more efficient.
- Distribute personalized advertisements: Targeting ads to a specific location allows marketers to create customized content that leads to more clicks and conversions. Advertisements can discuss location-specific offers, events, and seasonal products in the copy without the ad reaching the wrong customer.
- Test advertisements: Marketers can test new advertisement designs, content, products, and services in one location before releasing them to their entire audience.
- Exclude competitor locations: If a competing company has a strong foothold in a particular community, marketers can exclude that location from their targeting to avoid wasting ad budget on loyal customers unlikely to make the switch. This is also beneficial for companies that don’t want competitors seeing their digital ads.
- Become locally relevant: In some industries or for smaller companies, it can be a significant benefit to be local and relevant. For example, local restaurants and small businesses with few locations can take advantage of localized advertising. They can improve their relevance by using local listing management software.
Geotargeting best practices
To geotarget effectively, marketers must choose the right locations, exclude the wrong locations, study trends, and tweak advertising platform settings to their advantage. Here are some geotargeting best practices:
- Target the correct locations: Marketers should target the areas most relevant to the organization’s customer base. Brick and mortar businesses should always include the areas surrounding their locations. Even e-commerce sites should limit their targeting to regions with a proven track record of conversions.
- Use negative keywords: For effective campaign management, excluding the wrong locations is as important as choosing the right ones. If an organization doesn’t serve a specific location or country, they should exclude that location from their campaigns using negative keywords.
- Study the trends: Google Trends offers insight into which locations are more likely to convert. If an organization’s keywords perform exceptionally well in a specific geographic area, targeting that area will likely result in conversions.
- Target users in the desired location: Google’s default setting will advertise to users who search the targeted area. For best results, marketers should alter Google ad settings to show advertisements to users who are in the specified location, not those who search it.
Martha Kendall Custard
Martha Kendall Custard is a former freelance writer for G2. She creates specialized, industry specific content for SaaS and software companies. When she isn't freelance writing for various organizations, she is working on her middle grade WIP or playing with her two kitties, Verbena and Baby Cat.
