Stop Selling Ice Cream to the Eskimos

No one in their right mind would try to sell ice cream to the Eskimos in Alaska. They wouldn’t would they?

However everyday many Adwords advertisers are doing just that and most of them have no idea that they are doing it. They are advertising their products in countries and regions that are simply not giving them a decent return on their advertising investment (if in fact ANY return on investment!).

My example of ice cream to Eskimos might sound extreme to you but the principle is sound. Even if there is no good reason why a product would not sell in a certain location, it’s can still be a fact that your product in particular just does do very well in that location. There can be many reasons for this. Maybe a dominant local provider? Whatever the reason, if you struggle in one location it might be better to give up and concentrate your effort and budgets in locations where you are selling.

So how do you find out which locations are responding well to your advertising and which are not?

As always, Google have a report in its Adwords Report Center that tells you exactly this. It’s a fairly recent new addition to their list of extremely useful reports.

This new report is called the Geographic Performance report and you can find it in the menu with all the other standard reports.

With the report you can get a great understanding of the impact of your campaigns and AdGroups across all the geographic locations you are advertising.

You can find out about impressions, clicks conversions and all the usual statistics such as average cost of click, conversion rates, etc.

This information is just another invaluable tool to allow you to target your campaigns more closely to the successful markets and get more return on your Adwords spend.

If I had one complaint about the report at the moment, it is that it will only deliver the results on a day by day basis over the time that you select for the report. I would prefer to get a summary Region and Country/Territory. Still there is the export to Excel option and this will allow you to create your own summary totals.

If you have never been into your Adwords Report Center then shame on you! Some of the reports can provide information that makes the difference between making a loss or a profit. You can even set the reports up so that they email you the results on a regular basis, so there’s no excuse for not getting the information regularly.

Vernon Riley is a founder of KKSmarts. Their site contains many free guides covering all aspects of Website Promotion and especially Google Adwords.