What Google says...
"Location targeting is based on a variety of signals, including users' settings, devices, and behavior on our platform, and is Google’s best effort to serve ads to users who meet your location settings. Because these signals vary, 100% accuracy is not guaranteed in every situation."
To combat getting leads from the wrong area, we use these tools:
- Geographic Restrictions on Ad Placement
- Negative Keywords
- Ad Copy
- Landing Page Copy
GEOGRAPHIC RESTRICTIONS
For most of the traffic sources, we can literally restrict your ads from showing using graphical boundaries. However, this doesn't always make sense. Because, using that method only, you are losing all the people that are from out of the area that may be looking to move to the area.
NEGATIVE KEYWORDS
For most of the traffic sources like Google, we use geography restrictions but we combine with other methods like Negative Keywords that eliminate most (but not all) of the traffic from other areas. This is in case someone living elsewhere is looking to move to your area. We want to show ads to those people because they are proactively looking for a home even though they may currently be a thousand miles outside of your area right now.
In this case we try to eliminate getting leads when the intent is for a different location than yours. We do this by using "Negative Keywords". Google is not supposed to display your ads whenever a negative keyword is present. So for each of your campaigns, we include a list of these negative keywords. In the example below, you can see we have included "Indiana" and "IN". That's because, for this particular area, the customer wanted leads from Mooresville, North Carolina NOT Mooresville, Indiana:
However, this is not 100% foolproof as Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc. will still sometimes show the ad. But even then the prospect would have to ignore what the ad says in terms of the state.
AD & LANDING PAGE COPY
We also try to prevent producing leads from the wrong area by using language in the ad copy and on the landing pages that make it very clear that home searcher is registering for your area:
You can see we've added "NC" in this example.
We do the same for the landing page. It includes language that specifies the STATE. For example let's say your primary area was EDINA, MN :
We would build a custom landing page with language for Edina, MN. We would then build an ad campaign where the ads themselves only mention Edina, MN.
Like: "Edina MN Homes For Sale - Search all Edina MN homes here!"
We then tell Google to ONLY show our ads when someone types in a search phrase with the word "Edina" in it:
"homes for sale in Edina"
In order for a lead outside of your targeted areas to register, they would have to fight us every step of the way.
As an example, the lead would have had to do a keyword search for 'Edina', click on an ad that says 'Edina MN homes for sale go to a landing page that says 'Edina Minnesota homes for sale' and then ignore all of that and register onto the website.
So we are very proactive about preventing generating leads from the wrong area. However, even with all these blocks in place, it does still happen from time to time.
With online lead generation, it is nearly impossible to entirely stop these kinds of leads from coming in without blocking legitimate, good leads from registering also. But we definitely work towards eliminating the issue as much as possible.