Google announced earlier today that location targeting on the Display will work much easier. This should streamline the Display Network options allowing businesses to target based on location in the Display Network.
Up until today the only location targeting signal applicable to ads on the Google Display Network was the likely physical location of the user. Now, both the location extracted from the content of the page and the likely physical location can be used. If you are a business that isn’t using these two different features you need to be separating them out seeing which works the best. Now you can see which is different. Google will look at the content on your page.
Note that those that are using this feature for the first time (speaking of the advanced location targeting) on the Display Network that the default setting is to show to people “in” or “viewing pages about” your targeted location, but you can edit this option at any time. You should change this if you don’t want this option as the default.
Let’s say a customer in Atlanta is planning a trip to Hawaii and she’s looking at websites about fun things to do in Hawaii. A coffee plantation tour service from Hawaii would like to show ads about its offers to such a user. Similarly, an airline would like to advertise flight services to this user. The new targeting enhancements give the tour service and airline such capabilities, as both an ad targeted to Hawaii for a coffee plantation tour and an ad targeted to Atlanta for flights from Atlanta may now both show on the same page.
There are several situations in which you should not really be using location to target an ad. For example, a user reading about news in Hawaii may not be interested in “Hawaii tours”. For this reason, you should only show the location signal on a limited set of pages when we believe it may be useful. You can gain insight into the sites on which your ads are showing on the placement report, and into the locations on the geographic report.
Note that all campaigns targeting the Display Network will automatically be opted into the default option, which is to reach people in, searching for, or viewing pages about your targeted location. If you wish to exclude campaign traffic from people viewing pages about your location, you can choose “People in my targeted location” in advanced location options.
These changes were ported over to all accounts today. I would love to know if any of you have been in the beta test for this and had good use of this.
