For those of you who have conversion tracking enabled, here’s a great way to increase your profits:

Ok, everyone knows that with Google AdWords you can receive traffic from just about anyone in the world.  If you’re smart, you will only advertise in countries where you feel people will buy the product you’re promoting.  Unfortunately, before you start advertising you cannot tell 100% which countries will make you money and which countries will not make you money.

But, once your advertisements have been running for a few weeks (maybe more depending on how many sales you’ve made), there’s a very easy way for you to find out which countries are making you money and which countries are costing you money.  To do this, go to your reports section in your AdWords account and run a geographical report for a specific campaign/adgroup.  This report will give you traffic data for each country/region/and city.

How does this increase your profits?

Easy!  With a report like this I can see that Mexico is not producing enough widget sales to cover advertising costs, so i de-select Mexico from my campaign settings.  I can also see that Australia is producing a lot of sales for widgets, so I add the country New Zealand to the list of countries I’m advertising in.  I can even take it a bit further, I could see that New York was buying a lot of widgets, but New York City was not.   To fix this, i could tell Google to show my ads in New York, but not New York City.

These are just a few examples of how you can take advantage of this report.  Remember, don’t target every country in the world, you’ll lose a lot of money if you do that.  If you’re starting off and don’t know what countries to advertise in, use Google’s Insights for Search Tool.

Posted in AdWords