Just saw this article posted over at the Inside AdWords Blog called New options and new look for location targeting and I have to say I am mighty impressed. As you can imagine spending some time in the political advertising world, you really need to come up with local targeting techniques and now Google made the options a little better and jazzed up the interface. For the life of me I don't get why some political campaigns run ads outside their geo-target. Ryan and I at Connell Donatelli often talk about where a campaign should run and pretty much now in 2007/2008 if you have a Senate Race your are probably running it national, but House and Governor races you are probably running at the state level. General rules of thumb and not absolutes; plus the House races you are going to a district level. Well Google just made it easier for you congressional district targeting folks. Here's what Google allows you to do now:
- You can use their newly designed platform to search for your region or target
- Browse through locations by drilling down country, state, MSA, city
- Bundles that they made (more on that in a second)
- Create custom targets by drawing on a map or loading in zipcodes
So let's say you want to work on a search campaign for Rodney Frelinghuysen out of NJ District 11. You could use Google to load in zip codes but then again the minimum radius you can choose is 10 miles. That's not bad, but maybe you want to be more accurate. You can try drawing District 11 in Google's Map and get as close as you can.
As you can see from my screen shots below I don't think I did half bad trying to get close to the actual district and it took me 2 minutes to draw it out. If you really wanted to nail it, you could zoom in even more with Google and try and really match the lines. It is definitely a useful tool and one that helps you out immensely if you are in politics, local marketing, or just about anything that needs to get specific geo-customers.
The other search engines like Yahoo and MSN don't have a tool like this today and in fact, one of the annoying things about Yahoo is that they opt you into North American targeting and then you need to go in a remove Canada. Anyway Google's new geo-targeting tools is definitely cutting edge; I haven't tested loading in a ton of zip codes so I'm not sure if Google has a max setting, but we have just the client to test it out on (and no it is not John McCain for President who BTW - will win New Hampshire). I'm also not sure how useful the bundles will be, but then I'm splitting hairs. Google once again shows why they are every advertiser's and especially the small advertiser's best friend...
PardonMyFrench,
Eric
Comments