Geo-Targeting with Google Ads

Targeted Google Ads are a must for every marketer who wants to ensure maximum return from every campaign. Some great options include targeting audiences based on their personal characteristics, or geotargeting audiences based on their location. Let’s take a look at geo-targeting and how you can use this feature to drive the effectiveness of your campaigns.

Google Ads: Why Geo-Target?

Google ads — one of the largest advertising networks in the world — offers marketers a number of options when it comes to audience targeting. These include the geotargeting of entire countries, cities, regions, and even individual postal code areas.

Postal code targeting in particular provides marketers with the option to use supplementary datasets to gain extra insights into populations at a postal code level. Spotzi’s platform arms you with numerous datasets from market research agencies such as GfK and Vividata. Marketers can then use these datasets to look into any population’s characteristics, demographics, purchasing power, and even buying behaviour. Targeting Google ads based on these numerous insights can help you maximize your marketing resources and drive each campaigns’ effectiveness.

Focus your Campaign Budget on the Right Consumers

Strategic distribution of your marketing budget is key when it comes to maximizing the return on your marketing efforts. This is especially true for small businesses; targeting specific postal codes within a larger catchment area can help you capture your most promising audiences’ attention while also using portions of your budget to explore connections with other audiences.

Organize your Campaigns by Audience Travel Times

Spotzi makes it easy to target populations based on a distance radius or travel time from your store or business. Simply choose any geographic location and set your custom travel time — either by foot or car. Spotzi will then automatically select each postal code area that falls within your travel or distance criteria, at which point you can either continue analyzing these postal codes or can simply download them as a list for use in other platforms.

Increase Effectiveness with Local Campaigns

Local marketing can have a big impact on domestic brand awareness. Targeting different audiences based on proximity and travel time allows marketers to tailor local campaigns in order to speak directly to the hearts of the communities they’re most directly engaged with. Adjusting ad content to different target audiences helps to increase the effectiveness and CTR of your campaigns — therefore maximising the return on your marketing budgets.

Advanced Postal Code Targeting

Targeting at postal code level offers marketers the advantage of using numerous datasets to analyze each postal code’s audiences. Google Ads already offers insights into some basic demographics such as age, gender, family composition, and some countries' household income data. Affinity segments and in-market audiences can also provide insight into a population’s online behavior and interests. Audience segmentation can, however, go a step further with Spotzi’s postal code level data. Spotzi’s cookieless and AVG friendly platform was devised to advance marketers’ targeting strategies by offering insights into characteristics such as consumer behavior, purchasing power, and more..

Google Ads: Targeting by Postal Code

Google Ad targeting can become increasingly more and more advanced once you begin working with the right data. The following tips can benefit your marketing efforts and help you tailor each Google campaign to its most promising audiences:

Reliable Sources

The quality of each data source is a crucial factor when analyzing populations and building a campaign strategy. Sources such as Statistics Netherlands provide marketers and researchers with reliable, up-to-date demographic data. Other trusted sources — such as GfK and Vividata — offer many kinds of reliable market research data at a postal code level. Insights into a population’s demographic data helps marketers paint a more detailed picture of an audience’s characteristics and interests. This ensures that no population remains "unknown" and that you can effectively target each person who may be of interest to your business.

Advanced Targeting in a Privacy-Friendly Way

Aggregating data at a postal-code level ensures that no data can be traced back to an individual user and that your marketing insights remain privacy-friendly.

Include Offline Purchases in Audience Building

Are you building a Google Ads campaign for a company that owns many brick-and-mortar stores? If so, you have the option of using POS (Point-of-Sale) data to create targeted Google Ads. Simply collect your shoppers’ postal codes at the time of each sale and proceed to gain more insights into areas with the highest concentration of your existing customers. You can even use Spotzi’s dashboards to analyze each postal code and find look-alike audiences in new, promising areas.

Cross-Media Campaigns: Bridge the Gap Between Online and Offline

Are you simultaneously running Google Ads and Out-of-Home campaigns? The teamwork of these campaigns can be optimized by increasing your Google Ads targeting within the postal code areas that also house your OOH campaign’s billboards. This offers more opportunity for repeat exposure and can have a greater impact on your target audiences.

Expand your Targeting with Postal Code Level Data

Exclusively relying on Google Ads’ targeting features limits you to a set number of standard targeting characteristics. Adding postal code datasets from sources such as Spotzi allows you to enormously expand this number of characteristics, and ultimately target audiences who are more relevant to your brand or business. Spotzi offers thousands of data points at postal code level — everything from purchasing behavior at product level to personal income and demographic data. These datasets and more can all be used to find and target your best-fit customers.

Postal Code Targeting and Google Ads: The Spotzi Way

Are you ready to use Google ads to target specific postal codes? You must first begin with a list of the postal codes you'd like to target with your campaign. Spotzi offers users access to a number of geomarketing tools aimed at facilitating the search for these postal codes. Our targeting options include:

• Targeting ZIP/Postal codes within a certain radius of your selected location.
• Targeting ZIP/Postal codes within a certain travel time of your selected location.
• Drawing your own selection on the map to generate a list of ZIP/Postal codes within that area.
• Targeting ZIP/Postal code areas based on consumer behavior filters or thousands of other audience characteristics.
• Using a combination of all of the above!

How to Import Postal Codes into Google Ads?

Have you finished generating a list of postal codes using Spotzi’s dashboards? If so, you’re now ready to start importing this list into Google Ads:

1. Begin by setting up the targeting of your campaign under ”Settings”. Please note: This targeting is only possible at campaign level, and the use of different ads will require the creation of multiple campaigns.
2. Click “Locations” and select “Advanced Search”. Select the option to apply locations in bulk.
3. Add your list of postal codes (limiting the list to one postal code per line). Please keep in mind that you must also include a country name or ISO-2 country code (such as A1A, Canada or A1A, CA.)

Once you know how to target ZIP/postal codes using Google Ads you’re ready to start building custom Google Ads audiences. Organize your audiences based on a variety of characteristics to later create separate campaigns for each target group and test the effectiveness of each future campaign.