Geotargeting

One of the easiest ways to make a slightly unprofitable campaign profitable is to adjust the geotargeting.

Geotargeting is just a fancy way of saying location. It refers to the location of the people viewing the ads in your campaign.

Let’s say you have a campaign that was optimized using TestiVar before running. You invest $100 for a particular keyword going to an optimized lead generation offer (also optimized with TestiVar software). At the end of the campaign, you only earned $88. That is a negative ROI.

The first step is normally to reduce your bid to 88% of whatever it was during the initial test. That will instantly put your campaign at a neutral ROI which is what you want for maximum lead generation.

However, that also means that the number of leads generated will be reduced. The real goal is to eventually get the campaign so that it has a neutral ROI with a bid that will keep your ad at the top position for the advertising path in question.

We tackle this goal in a variety of ways. The first is to start another test on the landing page ad copy. There is always something new to test.

The second way (and the way that is generally the fastest way to a neutral ROI with the top bid) is to adjust the geotargeting. This is very simple and almost always works with a single pass of testing.

The first step is to split your campaign into two campaigns. We previously had a campaign that was unique to one advertisement path and one keyword. Now we will have two campaigns for that one advertisement path and one keyword. The first will include all of the locations of actual customers of the initial campaign. The second will contain all of the other locations.

There may have been some geotargeting that was already suggested by the TestiVar data during the initial campaign (based on the success or failure of other businesses in that same market using that same advertising path). If there wasn’t, then we start out all campaigns using all English language countries.

The list of countries we use as a default includes the following 94 countries:

American Samoa

Anguilla

Antigua and Barbuda

Australia

Bahamas

Barbados

Belize

Bermuda

Botswana

British Indian Ocean Territory

British Virgin Islands

Brunei

Cameroon

Canada

Cayman Islands

Christmas Island

Cocos (Keeling) Islands

Cook Islands

Cyprus

Denmark

Dominica

Eritrea

Ethiopia

Falkland Islands / Malouines

Fiji

Finland

Gambia

Ghana

Gibraltar

Grenada

Guam

Guernsey

Guyana

Hong Kong

India

Ireland

Isle of Man

Israel

Jamaica

Jersey

Kenya

Kiribati

Lebanon

Lesotho

Liberia

Luxembourg

Malawi

Malta

Marshall Islands

Micronesia, Federated States of

Montserrat

Namibia

Nauru

Netherlands

New Zealand

Niue

Norfolk Island

Northern Mariana Islands

Pakistan

Palau

Papua New Guinea

Philippines

Pitcairn Island

Puerto Rico

Rwanda

Saint Helena

Saint Kitts and Nevis

Saint Lucia

Saint Martin

Saint Vincent and Grenadines

Samoa

Seychelles

Sierra Leone

Singapore

Solomon Islands

South Africa

Sudan

Swaziland

Sweden

Switzerland

Tanzania

Tokelau

Tonga

Trinidad and Tobago

Turks and Caicos Islands

Tuvalu

Uganda

United Kingdom

United States

USA Minor Outlying Islands

Vanuatu

Virgin Islands

Zambia

Zimbabwe

They are selected because they either have English as their official language, English is spoken by a large percentage of the population, or there is a large volume of English speakers in that country relative to other countries in the world.

The only exception is Nigeria where most of the population speaks English. We don’t include that country because it has NEVER been found to be profitable in ANY campaign for anything.

So… back to the campaign that had an 88% ROI. We split it into two campaigns. One is geotargeted to every country on the above list that resulted in a sale during the initial campaign. The bid is set to remain the same for this campaign. It is set to make sure the campaign remains in the top spot.

The other campaign is geotargeted to all of the countries that did NOT result in a sale. The bid for that campaign is reduced by 88%. Some other factor on the landing page or with the ad copy is placed under test to try to get this campaign up to a 100% ROI.

That is the power of geotargeting and how we use it to fix a negative ROI campaign.