Improve Quality Score and Increase Conversions Using AdWords Geographic Performance Reports

Google Adwords shows your ads more often in a geographic region based on the CTR (historical performance) of the ads in that region. Let's say your ads had high CTR, when displayed in Vancouver than in Toronto. Google Adwords will display your ads more often in Vancouver than Toronto. So what?

Problem 1: Adwords doesn't consider the conversion data when deciding to show your ads in different geographic regions. Let's say your ads had higher number of conversions when displayed in Toronto. But the ads had poor CTR compared to the same ads when displayed in Vancouver. So your ads will be shown more often in Vancouver than in Toronto. So you will be losing conversions, revenues and incur more costs in acquiring new customers.

Solution: Geographic performance reports. Adwords Geographic performance report provides information about the country, Region, Metro and City where your ads were displayed. Also you have options to select and see the number of impressions, clicks, ctr, conversions, avg. cpc, cost etc.
Use the Geographic performance reports to determine which cities or regions you have more conversions but low CTR. You can try to analyze and determine the reasons for your ads having poor CTR. Try to improve the CTR by increasing the bid, changing the ad copies or target that specific region separately in its own campaign. This ensures that your ads are more often show in regions where you get conversions.

Problem 2: You are targeting Nationwide and getting more clicks from smaller towns than major cities. Ex. You get more clicks and visitors from Kamloops than Toronto. Toronto is the biggest metropolitan in Canada and it's a huge market to be present. Let's say you have determined that the Toronto region has potential for your product and the account has sufficient advertising budget allocated. Then one of the possibilities is that your ads are not getting enough exposure in Toronto.
Solution: Use Geographic Performance reports to determine whether your ads are getting enough exposure. Check if you have low number of impressions or whether the ads are showing in 2nd or 3rd page due to high competition. Check the bids to determine if they need to be increased, if the ad copies need to be changed and whether you want to target the region through a separate campaign. Use Google Adwords ad preview to determine the competition and the ad copy messages they are using. By taking necessary steps to improve the exposure of your ads, you can generate more conversions.

Conclusion: The benefit of this approach is it helps to improve your bottom line. Further Adwords uses the historical performance of your ads in specific geographic regions as one of the metrics to calculate quality score. Click here for more details

By optimizing your bids more effectively for specific geographic regions, you can improve your overall quality score leading to lower cost per click and ads being displayed more often leading to increase in conversions.

Bonus:

Your Geographic report data won't match your actual search data, particularly for impressions. The reason given by Google Adwords is they won't be able to track users coming from unidentifiable IP addresses. Further Google Adwords might consider not including impressions when it's in negligible numbers. Also it has limitations in terms of computing the impressions from different geographic regions across multiple days.