: Selecting your audience

[Reyed Mia (Apprentice, DIU)]

: Selecting your audience

- At this point we've created a new campaign and we've gone through our general settings. Now I'm going to continue scrolling down until we get to the Locations heading here on the left. It's here that we'll review our location and language targets. At first glance there are some pretty generic radio buttons next to these locations. I can choose All countries and territories, my country and countries nearest to me, my country, or the option for Let me choose. In this example we wanna be showing our ads to everyone in the United States, because our keywords will be used to restrict the focus to those who are expressing an intent in our particular location.

So I would choose the radio button next to United States. But if you're running ads for your local business you might want to restrict things even further. You could start by targeting by state, in this case I'll choose Let me choose and then start typing in a state, say California. You'll notice AdWords provides you with a drop down, and you have several options that are matching the term California. Here we have the entire state, we have California City, we have some universities, and so on and so forth. To the right of the link you can see the Reach, and this is how many people are included in this specific location.

Here we can choose Add, Exclude, or Nearby. So if you wanted to do all of the United States except for California, we could then choose California, United States, Exclude. In this case, let's choose Add and you'll notice it's now in the Targeted locations table. We could remove it by choosing the Remove link. We could also add in a particular zip code, say 93101 for Santa Barbara. Here I can choose the zip code, or it also shows me the whole city Santa Barbara, in other words, the zip code itself is probably not encompassing the entire city, and therefore Santa Barbara has more than one zip code, so it's suggesting that maybe I want the whole city as apposed to that particular zip code.

I'm gonna go ahead and remove that and show you what happens in the Advanced search box, which is this link here on the right. When I select this we get some even more interesting options. In this interface you can still do your searches, but you have additional options available to you. Let's say that we only wanted to target people within a 50 mile radius of Santa Barbara. To do that I'll choose Radius targeting from the link at the top, I'll type in santa barbara, and then I'll choose 50 miles for my radius, and hit Search.

Here on the left we can confirm that the radius is 50 miles around Santa Barbara, and then I can choose Add to add it into my targeting. We can also look for Location groups. I'll select that link here at the top. And from the drop down we can choose a group type, maybe Places of interest. So here if I type Places of interest within los angeles I see a drop down appear and I can select Los Angeles, California there. And then I have the option to choose the type of place of interest, so I can choose Airports, Central commercial areas, or even Universities.

So if I choose Airports and then hit Add, Google's now going to target Airports within Los Angeles, California, so any airport within Los Angeles. So as you can see, the Advanced targeting gives you even more granular control over how you wanna set up your targeting. I should also point out that all targeting works in the and relationship, meaning that everything you add is going to target that and anything else, so it's not restrictive. If you choose California and airports near Los Angeles you're gonna get everyone in California and anyone near airports in Los Angeles.

Let's scroll down and I'll choose the + icon next to the Locations options (advanced) link. And this brings in a Target and Exclude advanced option. It's important to know that there are two main ways that Google can determine if you, as a web-surfer, match the location criteria. The first is if you're actually, physically inside that location target. And Google uses things like your IP address, and cell signals to figure that out. The second is if you're not actually in that location, but if you show a specific interest in the targeted location.

So in this case I opted to allow anyone in the USA to look for the Landon Hotel, because I'm going to use San Francisco as part of my keywords, but I could alternatively restrict my location to San Francisco and select this third option labeled People searching for, or who show interest in my targeted location. And what this would do is restrict it to anyone who's looking for San Francisco, whether or not they're in San Francisco at all. I highly recommend that you simply leave these defaulted for the time being. You can experiment with the impact of modifying these variables as you build out more and more campaigns.

Next up, as I scroll down, you can target people who speak specific languages. I'll choose Edit next to the word English and you can choose from a list of languages that Google provides. It's important to know that Google will not translate your ads for you. So a good rule of thumb here is that unless you have a really good reason, you should be targeting only one language per campaign. And this ensures that you're showing ads in languages that people can understand. And that's it for your audience criteria. In the next movie we'll continue on to review our bid settings.

https://www.linkedin.com/learning/google-adwords-essential-training-2/selecting-your-audience