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The Problem

As a Google ads agency in Melbourne we often want to target Google Ads campaigns by area or suburbs? Maybe you don’t want your ads to show up in a certain part of the city? The best way to ensure this is to set up negative locations and location targeting: simply ‘negative out’ all of the areas where you don’t want your specific ads to show, and zero in on your desired areas.

While this may seem like enough, what happens if you are sitting in your office on Flinders Street on your lunch break, looking for a “Flower delivery to Geelong” for your daughter who is studying there? You type in “flower delivery to Geelong” and get in touch with our client, Jim, who is based in the south-east so he doesn’t want to drive out to Geelong. If you get in touch with Jim, he will tell you that he cannot deliver flowers to Geelong and would have just wasted money on a click from Google Ads.

While certain clicks may not seem like a lot of money, to small businesses, if these clicks start to gradually add up, all of a sudden there could be up to $100 worth of clicks just wasted, which is essentially throwing money away. The best way to avoid situations like this is to be proactive about the way you target certain campaign locations.

Be Proactive with these 2 approaches

Negative Keyword Approach

Let’s start with the easiest way. Here is a Google sheet, that you can easily duplicate and copy for your own personal use. It lists all the suburbs in Melbourne, with distance and direction from the CBD! Looking at the above scenario, someone like Jim may be happy to deliver 30km south and east of the city and 15km north and west. Using the above sheet for reference, Jim would then be able to filter out every suburb that doesn’t fall into this category and ‘negative’ them. That way, when people search for flower delivery in those areas, his ads do not show up, and he doesn’t waste money on clicks.

Ad Group Structure Approach

The second approach is essentially the opposite of the above. Instead of negativing out each suburb that does not fall into the category you want, create ad groups for each of the areas in which you do want to show up. Just create landing pages for each suburb you want to target, then create an ad campaign for that specific suburb and use the location targeting to focus in that area.

Help Save Money Now

Hopefully, the above strategies, as well as the free Google sheet, will help you save you (or your client) money by eliminating useless clicks. Both strategies have their pros and cons, and on balance the Ad group Structure Approach is the most beneficial approach. It gives you greater control over your account and it allows you to create pages for specific people in those suburbs, so they can feel a personal connection to the website when clicking. While it does take a bit more time and effort to set up, it will almost certainly show you a greater return or lower cost.

Whilst we have not tested it yet, it could work in reverse for shopping ads, by using the list as negative keywords in a multi level shopping ads campaign.

Also, Google has a feature for location insertion, we found it was not always accurate and it was only as good as the information Google knew about the user. So we decided to create a way that we could scale across hundreds of suburbs very quickly and the way to do that was to compile a list of the suburbs, in this case for Sydney and then we could build out ad groups, ad text and keywords all specific to the suburb.

So we decided, why not share this suburb list with the wider public, whether its for Google ads, SEO or even non-marketing needs. Open the sheet here and create a copy of it. 

If you need help implementing it feel free to get in touch now.