Google AdWords: Learning Center

To reach highly specialized audiences - for instance, only customers within ten miles of your place of business - you can create your own customized target region. For more on this very useful tool, please see the Language and Location Targeting lesson.

As we learned earlier, AdWords advertisers can create new advertising campaigns targeted to different countries. You need not create a new account to do this - different campaigns can be run under the umbrella of your single original account.

To create a new campaign, simply click the Create New Campaign link that appears above the existing campaigns within your account. One of the first steps in creating a new campaign will be to choose your language targets. After choosing your target language(s), you'll choose your target location(s).

You can target by country or by individual regions and cities within countries. You can also specify a customized region of your own creation.

Targeting your ads internationally may lead to more impressions for your ads, and more impressions can be good. However, beware of low-quality clicks from an audience that is too large and poorly defined. Well-targeted ads do more than reach the right audience: they increase your clickthrough rate, which can help your ads improve their ranking among other ads on the page.

We've been talking about targeting on a large scale, to countries and groups of countries. Let's look at a different possibility: targeting only cities and regions within certain countries (not yet available for all countries).

Local targeting means your ads appear only to customers searching for, or located in, the cities or regions you've selected. This is extremely useful if your business serves only particular areas -- if you are, for instance, a florist with shops in Milan, Florence, and Venice.

Local targeting is one of the first options in creating a new campaign. First you select a country, and then you'll be given the chance to target one or more regions, cities or metropolitan areas in that country.