here are a couple posts that I’ve so far seen mentioning the new Geographic Performance Report in AdWords. It was great seeing being able to see the news of this since I don’t really think following the AdWords blog has enough value, but I do wish I’d at least be able to read the opinions and thoughts of other people in the PPC world regarding the report.
Personally, I think that for businesses using Google conversion tracking, this report will be great for them. For accounts with conversion tracking enabled, the report allows to see conversion statistics. They can see which parts of the country or state are doing better than others by seeing overall conversions, order sizes, etc.
Google seems to have said what you can do with the report in a good way:
“Say, for example, you sell and ship gourmet ice cream to anywhere in the U.S. After running the report, you find that your ads are doing great in Miami, Florida and Phoenix, Arizona, but you’re also finding a surprising amount of customers from Juneau, Alaska. Next step: refine your campaigns. By specifically targeting those locations where your ads perform best you can maximize your campaign’s performance.”
For other advertisers who aren’t using Google’s conversion tracking, there is still some benefit to the report. First, you can at least get a rough idea of where a majority of your traffic is coming from - although you’ll most likely see it’s coming from the largest states (California, Texas, New York, etc.). Nevertheless, I think the position metric will be even more important. With Google’s new quality score starting to go into effect, geographic metrics will most likely be more heavily weighed (or at least more transparent), than they were in the past. The average position metric reported by geographic location should allow advertisers to see if they radically lower positions in some areas than others. This can hint at a more competitive geographic market or other factors, but can at least help raise a red flag to the issue.
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