Geotargeting and SEM: A practical guide to spending less and getting more
As a digital marketer and SEM specialist, I work with location-based marketing on a daily basis, but I know that’s not the case for everyone. In this article, I’ll break down the basics of geotargeting and search engine marketing and answer the age-old question, “How does this affect my vacation rental business?” I hope the information I provide gives you the tools and terms to discuss the use of geo-targeting within your pay-per-click (PPC) strategy with ease and confidence.
SEM stands for Search Engine Marketing, which is the process of using paid advertisements in Microsoft Ads and Google Ads to market your website and show up higher on search engine results pages (SERPs) by paying money for ads and bidding on keywords related to your website. Mark. However, SEM is also often used to describe “anything” in terms of being seen in search engines, including SEO.
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, which focuses on optimizing a website’s landing page pages with keywords and other ranking factors increase your chances of showing up higher in the SERPs. If a website is new or in an extremely competitive market, SEM along with SEO is a smart strategy to get your brand in front of the right audience.
Here’s an example of what a SERP looks like with paid ads and organic results.
Geotargeting, not to be confused with its cooler sibling geofencing, is not as complicated as it sounds. Geotargeting is used to strengthen your campaigns by targeting people who have been in a specific location along with other targetable variables such as demographics, behaviors and interests. Geofencing only targets everyone in a certain area. For example, you’d use geotargeting to be more granular with your vacation rental ads, but you might use geofencing to push property management ads to a local competitor’s homeowner’s weekend event. (None of you would, right?) Geofencing is also synonymous with using a Bluetooth beacon; when someone shows up in a certain area, like your business, they get some kind of notification on their phone.
Whether you call it a potato or a potato, the bottom line is that location-based targeting should always be used in any PPC campaign in the vacation rental industry, especially if you’re in a popular area. Put your money in cities and states that have high conversion rates and are known to reach your market. This is the best way to maximize your budget, especially if you have a limited one! If you’re running ads on Google and not using geo-targeting, you’re probably wasting money. Be sure to look at which cities and states are converting the best, rather than just those who are watching. The viewpoints are curious. Bookers are engaged.
A geo-targeted pay-per-click campaign is a powerful weapon in your digital marketing arsenal. Not only do you use your PPC budget more effectively by geotargeting areas that have a history of converting viewers into bookers, but depending on your product, you can adjust your ad copy to match with the terminology of the geographic location you are targeting.
Over our years of PPC work in the VR industry, we’ve noticed that different regions of the US use different words to describe what they’re looking for (and Google knows this too). For example, when searching for a mountain destination, the most popular search term is “accommodation”. For a beach destination, they are “vacation rentals.” To use geo-targeting effectively, you need to make sure you create ads for every variation of what people are searching for so you can cover all the bases.
Whether it’s “beachfront” or “oceanfront,” “cabin” or “cottage,” or the international conundrum of “holiday” and “holiday,” when you update your copy of the ‘ad to match the terminology of the region you are targeting, increasing your chances of conversion.
By understanding which geographic areas bring you the highest revenue, curating your ad copy to match their dialect, and investing more in those locations, you’ll add tremendous value to your SEM strategy.
In June 2022, we noticed an increasing number of site visits for almost all of our customers coming from New York City. Not a little, but a lot of people.
When our team started discussing theories of a giant lizard uprising that forced every New Yorker to seek refuge in a 5-star luxury vacation rental, we realized something fishier than Godzilla was going on in the data and we started combing the web looking for answers about What was so special about New York all of a sudden?
Nothing came up.
But it wasn’t just New York. It was Chicago, Los Angeles, Seattle, Denver, all the major cities in all the major time zones, depending on what time zone the customer’s food markets were in. It was like a mass exodus! Doing what we do best, making movie references, as we analyzed and cross-referenced the data, the plot thickened.
The only people who fled these cities were iPhone users. More specifically, it was those users who recently upgraded to the new iOS 15.5 update. So unless we’re living in an early 2000s movie about cell phone attacks, the data doesn’t add up!
Through our research, an interesting and relevant article from February 22, 2006, tagged All Google roads lead to Kansas emerged While this article was not the answer to our current problem, it did provide some very valuable information that is relevant to our discussion today.
All Google roads lead to Kansas, or Coffeyville to be exact, review the geographic phenomenon that when Google Analytics can’t identify your IP address, they place you in the middle of the country, which is Coffeyville, Kansas.
Well, this article explains how Google tracks your information using third-party location providers. The Coffeyville mystery is likely due to inaccurate source data that is not necessarily a blocked IP address that would be displayed (not set), but actually a miscommunication between Google and its location provider. third parties
After confirming that Godzilla wasn’t terrorizing the citizens of New York City, we confirmed that by completely turning off location services and turning on iCloud Public Relay (which is a requirement for iCloud+) before visiting a website, you will also have your geographic location. ping your location and IP address from New York or Chicago to Google Analytics, no matter where you are!
Well, as most digital marketers know, the answer I give today will probably be old news tomorrow. The latest news about geo-targeting and search engine marketing is bittersweet. apple released a new update for iPhone users that has had an undeniable impact on geolocation in Google Analytics. With approximately 53% of all website visitors using mobile devices according to a study conducted by open itthis new privacy update will have a big impact on how we review geographic data in Google Analytics.
In June 2020, Apple introduced iOS 14 which required apps to request permission to track user activity. Fast forward to May 2022, we have the mass exodus from New York. Apple released a new privacy update 15.5 that affects all iOS users who interact with Safari. In one corner, Apple’s latest update to in-app privacy tracking is wonderful because it gives the consumer more control over their online activity being tracked, but as a digital marketer, it presents big problems for the data. Apple’s new privacy update makes geo-targeting much more difficult due to data inaccuracy.
The average vacation rental website receives 65% of all its traffic from a mobile device. The most used mobile device is the Apple iPhone. After running the numbers among our customers, this equates to 20-25% of website traffic being “geomasked”, which will skew your data.
A possible solution to location inaccuracy in Analytics could be as simple as creating a filter to remove major cities from certain views. However, these cities represent several travelers each year, so you shouldn’t completely eliminate targeting this area from your Google Ads strategy.
The solution? While you shouldn’t increase your bid strategy for these locations, you should use past data to strengthen your geo-targeting strategy. Focus on placements that have shown a high conversion-focused audience in the past.
The consequences of this inaccurate geolocation data are unfortunate for business owners and their digital marketing teams, as the data they receive through Google Analytics may not be accurate.
If you’ve noticed a strange increase in traffic recently, it’s important to do a little more digging! Add some parameters, isolate the variables and run an experiment. Always remember that no matter how accurate you believe the source of your data is, it should never be taken at face value and requires proper analysis with a trained eye for anomalies.
I could talk about the politics behind Apple’s latest update regarding its relationship with Google and Facebook, but I’ll leave that for another day.
Launching an online store is easy, but gaining authority on Google is difficult. It requires trust, loyalty and transparency from your brand. Although, I think Apple’s latest update is a positive thing for iOS users and gives them more control over their data usage.
I also think that many brands that spend money on SEM to market their products probably have a stake in the game and are providing a product that they value enough to invest in, and I want to see those ads. So with the exception of Godzilla tracking my location, I plan to share my data with certain apps to improve my shopping experience.
However, as a true crime podcast lover, I’m glad to know that I have more control over what data is shared from my phone. As a digital marketer, however, I implore Google to work with its third-party location providers to find a solution to these quirks. Even showing these non-trackable locations as (not established) would help SEM specialists and business owners properly use a geo-targeting strategy and accurately target viable locations rather than a popular metro region or a sweet farm in kansas.
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