Jan 11, 2020
Is adding EVERY city in the USA to negative keywords good practice?
For example, say I am running ads in Dallas Texas for "auto repair shops in" as a phrase match and targeting ONLY Dallas county which might have 30 cities.
Now imagine someone who sends little Johnny off to school in Bangor Maine and little Johnny has a car problem. So daddy, in Dallas, my clients' targeted area, searches "auto repair shops in Bangor ME"
Well my ad shows up and he clicks, costing my client $25.
This happens more times than you you.
So my thought is to acquire a database of every city and county in the united states. Add those to a master shared negative list. And when I set up a client in say Dallas, I remove the city names for Dallas County from the Master List.
I know, the negative list would be huge, but maybe this is common practice out there by you Ads gurus and I am just behind in my practice.
Details
Informational notification.
This question is locked and replying has been disabled.
Community content may not be verified or up-to-date. Learn more.
All Replies (3)
This is a frequent question
3 points to note:
- The method you re suggesting is not practical;
- You don't need to include a city name within the keyword. Geo-targeting is set at the campaign level.
- The approach to take is to clearly mention your service geo-region and (and car brands) in the ad-copy, so daddy in Dallas will not be confused about the location of the repair facility.
Jan 11, 2020
So when you way "you don't need to include a city name within the keyword" and I big on "best transmission shop near" someone in DALLAS could search "best transmission shop near Miami airport" and Google's brilliant "AI" would show my ad.
I see this all the time, but it would account for way less than 5% of relevant searches with city names.
Either roll with it, or try to add negatives. Start with the nearest common towns that are outside of the reach of the service. I typically (in Australia) add the capital cities and states, that is only 20 or so negatives. Much harder to negative every town and city in the USA (there is probably a numerical limit to negatives as well), and keep in mind, if the city name is misspelled, the negative won't work.