Please Track Countries Individually

Posted: February 8, 2007

Please. Please! PLEASE listen to this - it WILL increase your marketing effectiveness (and keep me from preaching it over and over) - Track Each Country Separately.

This is an all to common scenario. The US, UK, Canada, and Australia all speak English. Hmm, maybe I should just run one AdWords campaign for all of those countries.

Just because they speak English doesn’t mean they shop alike or even respond to offers the same way.

In fact - they are different countries. The English is slightly different. The idioms are very different. Offers, ads, spelling, etc should be different as well.

Isn’t it more useful to know your

US has a 3% CTR, .5% conversion rate and 10k visitors
Canada has a 1% CTR, 5% conversion rate and 500 visitors
Australia has a 6% CTR, 0% conversion rate and 16k visitors
UK has a 1% CTR, 11% conversion rate and 200 visitors

If your had one campaign for all of the your stats might look like you have an average conversion rate and OK click through rate, but you wouldn’t know how to optimize the campaign.

With the above info you can try to get more UK visitors (they’re converting), figure out why Australia isn’t converting (probably shipping costs), and why the US isn’t that interested in your offer.

Armed with the above knowledge, you can change ad copy, landing pages, offers by country and really drill down into what works for your business.

Without that knowledge, you’ll struggle if you’re focusing on US offers and just happening to be showing ads in other countries. You wouldn’t even know that Australia sent more visitors that the US.

Please don’t be lazy and just make one campaign that targets multiple countries. Understand your stats by country (and you could even do it by state, city, etc) and then you can optimize your PPC campaigns to their fullest potential.

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Written by Brad Geddes aka eWhisper · Filed Under Blog, Google AdWords, PPC Info

Comments

One Response to “Please Track Countries Individually”

Patrick Schaber on February 9th, 2007 11:13 am

Brad - great post! I couldn’t agree more. The same is true for Spanish speaking regions. Many regions have different methods for writing the language. It’s more work up front to organize for different regions, but the results are well worth the effort.