Q&A - Why should I only use one country per campaign?

Posted: October 7, 2008

This is a very common question, and one that’s often addressed in the AdWords Seminar. The answer to the question resolves around how you use your reporting statistics for further optimization.

If you run a campaign targeted to the UK, Canada, US, and Australia (a very common thing to see), and after a month you have these stats:

CTR: 5%
Conversion rate: 5%
CPC: $2

What do you do next? Where are your ads doing well?

If you had this data:

	Australia	Canada	US	UK
CTR	10%	3%	5%	1%
Conversion Rate	6%	1.5%	1%	12%
Cost Per Click	$5	$2	$10	$0.25

Suddenly, you can make much better decisions.

The UK converts well, and is the cheapest click, but has a much lower CTR – work on raising that CTR.
The US CPC is way too high compared to the others and the conversion rate, lower the CPC.
Do the math on Australia, with a high CPC, but a nice conversion rate, it might be an OK campaign.

The more granular you can view the data, the better decisions you can make.

And I didn’t even mention the most obvious question, how do you spell ‘color’ or ‘colour’ in your ad copy? Every area has a different belief system and different ways they react to words. You can’t test well for different geographies if you don’t have the data to work with.

There are some reasons to start bundling countries; however, a good general rule of thumb: target just one country per campaign.

Related Information:

« Slight change to the ‘Offical Quality Score’ - CTR on Partner Search Sites Matter in Certain Instances

Screen Resolutions – What do your visitors actually see? »

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

Comments

One Response to “Q&A - Why should I only use one country per campaign?”

richard on October 8th, 2008 1:17 am

the cost per conversion (cpa) for the US is $1000
(are any conversions worth that much?)
500x the UK
7.5x Canada
12x Australia

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