Google allows you as much geographical precision as you could possibly need. The default setting is by country: Google gives you a list of countries and then you choose the ones whose inhabitants will see your ads. Straightforward and uncomplicated, this setting is common for online businesses that can serve customers pretty much anywhere. If you sell downloadable software or telephone consulting, for example, you don't have any reason to exclude customers from Belgium, Israel, or New Zealand, assuming language compatibility. In my experience, certain African and Asian countries tend to be hotbeds of credit-card fraud, however — and if you don't think a particular country will add a great deal to your bottom line, you may want to leave it off your list.

Click the Edit link next to Locations to take you to a recently updated interface that enables you to target your campaigns as widely or as precisely as you desire. Under the Browse tab, Google lists the most commonly selected 24 countries at the top, beginning with the United States and continuing alphabetically from Australia to United Kingdom. If you click the Show All Countries link at the end of the list, you'll see a complete list of dozens of countries from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe. Select countries by clicking their check boxes. When your list is complete, click the Save button to return to the Edit Settings page.

The Bundles tab, as shown in Figure 7-2, enables you to choose with an even broader brush among 14 country bundles. Notice that these bundles overlap with the United States and Canada bundle contained within the North America bundle, and the last bundle, All Countries and Territories contains, you guessed it, all countries and territories.

If you want to target prospects more precisely, you can drill down into each country listed under the Browse tab. Click a country's expand button (the plus sign next to a country's name) to select or deselect regions/states within that country. Similarly, you can expand regions/states into cities/metro areas and metro areas into smaller cities. To select a single small city, deselect the country, region/state, and metro area that contain it and then select the specific city, as shown in Figure 7-3.

Figure 7-2. You can show your ads to multiple countries and territories.

Figure 7-3. You can target regions, individual states, metro areas, and cities within one country.

If you run a local business, the regional and city targeting may not be precise enough for you. After all, no matter how good a dry cleaner you may be, few customers will drive 45 minutes across town to drop off their dress shirts. Enter customized targeting to the rescue. You get to that page by clicking the Custom tab. You're given three options:

Figure 7-4. Centering the map on zip code 08618 and selecting a 2-mile radius produces a circular area that will see your ads.

Figure 7-5. Indulge your inner artist by creating a polygon within which to show your ads.

When you finish specifying the ad serving locations for this campaign, click the Save button to save your changes and return to the Campaign Settings page.

You can specify the language(s) of the users you want to see your ads. Click the Edit link to bring up a list of languages from Arabic to Vietnamese.

If your campaign is set up to show ads on the content network, you may be able to see a breakdown of your data by age and sex. (Because I turn 44 this year, I will not be making any middle-age jokes about that last bit.) When you set up conversion tracking (see Chapter 14), you receive data that shows which sex and age groups convert at the highest rates. This data allows you to modulate your bid prices, so you pay less for clicks from some groups than others.

Keep the default here (Focus on clicks, Manual bidding – maximum CPC bids) for now. Don't let Google optimize your budget. See the section, "Bidding Smart," later in this chapter, for a discussion of bidding strategies.

Click the plus sign next to the Position Preference, Delivery Method link to show these advanced settings. Click the Edit link next to each item to make any changes.

If you enable Position Preferences by clicking the radio button next to On: Automatically Manage Maximum CPC Bids to Target a Preferred Position Range and saving your changes, you can then designate a position range for each keyword. Now your ad will show for a given keyword when it falls within that position range, and Google will try to keep your ad within that range, given your budget limitations.

Essentially, position preference is like setting your maximum cost per click (CPC), except you focus on the outcome (position) instead of the input (how much you're willing to pay for that position). If you discover that your ad is most profitable at position 7, for example, you can tell Google to keep it there, instead of allowing it to fluctuate.

To play with position preference, go to the Keywords tab (from within a campaign or from within an individual ad group). In the column named Position Preference, click the word Any to input the highest and lowest position your ad will appear for that keyword (see Figure 7-6).

In Figure 7-7, I've configured the keyword [cold calls] to trigger ads that appear in position 7 only. You can edit position preferences for multiple keywords by checking the box to the left of the keywords you wish to edit, and then clicking the Edit button just above the keyword list.

Figure 7-6. You can change position preferences for an individual keyword.

Figure 7-7. The [cold calls] keyword will now show its ad in position 7 only.

If you exceed your daily budget on a regular basis, you have two choices: tell Google to pace your ads evenly through the day (Standard), or show the ads as often as possible until you run out of money (Accelerated).

However, the choice begs an important question: Why are you limiting your advertising spend? The concept of an advertising budget doesn't make sense if each ad is making money. If I offered you a dollar bill in exchange for your half-dollar, how many times would you want to complete that transaction? Does infinity sound about right to you? It wouldn't make sense for you to say, "I only trade my 50 cents for your dollar 24 times because my daily budget is 12 dollars."

In fact, as you're assessing the competition, if you find that their ads disappear and reappear on the Google search results page as you refresh the page, you can be fairly confident that they aren't profitable yet or they don't understand results-accountable marketing and won't be much of a threat to you.

You can set up campaigns to run for a predetermined time period. This is useful if you have a seasonal campaign (pool toys, Valentine's Day candy, or Happy January 25th cards) or an event-based campaign (tickets to the World Cup or presidential candidate hats and t-shirts in the months leading up to an election). You can specify start and stop dates in advance, thus saving you one more thing to remember to do later. Click the Edit link to set the campaign dates.

Click the Edit link next to Ad scheduling and gasp to discover that Google gives you the option to schedule your ads by 15-minute increments, any day of the week, as shown in Figure 7-8. You can run your ads from midnight to 2:45 a.m. Monday, 3:00–3:15 a.m. Tuesday, and so on. Click the Time Period setting for the desired day to specify the time periods for your ads to show on that day. By clicking the Bid Adjustment link near the top of the page, you can even adjust your maximum bids by time period. You may want to be in a higher position on weekends, or just after The Daily Show, or during Monday Night Football, and so on.

Figure 7-8. You can schedule when your ads appear by time and day of the week.

Click the Ad Delivery: Ad Rotation, Frequency Capping link to view the options here and then click the appropriate Edit link to make any changes.

Hold on for a short fire and brimstone sermon about the Ad Rotation setting: Until you start using the Conversion Optimizer, a very advanced tool that I talk about at the end of this chapter, please do not optimize your ads. I don't care where you are. Run, don't walk to a Web browser, log in to your account, choose a campaign, click the Settings tab, click the Ad Delivery: Ad Rotation, Frequency Capping link, click the Edit link (next to Ad rotation), and move the radio button from Optimize to Rotate. Then click the Save button.

Done? Okay, now I can get rational and calm again. Let me explain why you made this change, and why it's so important. When you run two ads in the same ad group, Google shows them to different people and gives you statistics on how each ad performed (see Chapter 13 for the gory — er, glorious — details of split-testing). If Google optimizes your ad rotation, the ads with lower click through rate (CTR) are shown less and the ads with higher CTR are shown more. Eventually, the poor performer stops showing, and Google declares a winner by default. You set up the test once, and it runs without you from then on. What could be bad?

First, your tests take much longer when you don't give each ad an equal chance to be "voted on" by searchers. You need a threshold number of impressions and clicks for each ad to determine a statistical winner. If one ad gets fewer and fewer impressions and clicks, it takes longer to declare that winner.

When you can't declare winners as they happen, you learn slower. Think of how fast bacteria adapt to antibiotics — because they go through so many generations in a short time frame. The more iteration per time frame, the more your ads can evolve and improve. AdWords is a playground where both evolution and intelligent design rule.

You also lose money because your campaigns are improving more slowly than they might. Ad groups that could achieve profitability in a few days, based on traffic, will take weeks or even months to start making money.

In the second-to-worst-case scenario, you don't figure out anything about your market because you don't even pay attention to the differences between the winning and losing ads. You don't figure out which headlines work best, so you can't improve your Web site, your e-mails, your expensive offline advertisements, and so on.

If you show ads on the content network, you can control how many times a unique user (the online marketing geek term for "person") sees your ad. Click the Edit link to set a number of views, specify the time frame (day, week, or month), and tell Google whether this limit should be applied to the entire ad group (that is, all the ads you may be rotating), or to each individual ad (called a "creative" here). Because the content network is more of a "branding" medium than search, and since you don't pay for impressions that don't lead to clicks (as long as you don't change the content network-bidding format), I would leave the default No Caps on Impressions. If you discover a very low CTR and you suspect the same uninterested people (oops, I mean "unique users") are viewing your ads over and over again, you can try to limit impressions and see whether your numbers improve.