All the major search engines including Google, Yahoo! & MSN allow you to geotarget your PPC ads to a specific radius, but does anyone really know how narrow this radius should be?

This question was posed recently in a Google Groups thread and Google AdWords Pro Steph put forward her suggestion. Here it is:

“Typically, you shouldn’t go smaller than 20 or 30 miles around, since if your radius is too small, it’s likely you’ll miss traffic from people that are actually in your target area.

You might also consider how local your business is (will people be willing to travel X distance?) and think about the trade-off between expanding the area to capture more false positives or shrinking the area and risk not reaching people that you actually want to because of their IP.

If you’re in a rural area, you might want to consider including the nearest metropolis if you know that IPs in your area are identified as a particular city or region.”

However, I think this suggested radius can’t be used for all campaigns; it will have to depend upon each individual company. As the folks at Search Engine Roundtable explain if you are a bike courier service in Manhattan, you probably don’t want people in Westchester County to see your ads. So, setting your radius to a smaller number might make sense, in this case most likely just the NYC metro area.

Geotargeting is just one area of a PPC campaign that needs to be executed properly so as to achieve the best results for your website, so I hope that this simple tip helps with your next PPC campaign.

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