Before jumping into the components of a local PPC account and why it matters, we should first define what constitutes a local PPC account. The basic definition is that it targets customers within a specific region. The strategy for localized PPC specifically involves using local keywords and geotargeting.  One would quickly assume that only brick and mortar businesses like a neighborhood pizza shop, dentist’s office, or boutique retailer would run local campaigns, but that isn’t always the case. Even if you have locations around the world,  you can serve and sell to potential customers virtually, by using a localized approach. 

The Value in Running Localized PPC

As PPC marketers, one of our biggest responsibilities is to optimize campaigns. The term ‘optimize’ may sound like a broad term, but it really represents many tactics. The biggest areas of focus for optimization would likely be to improve the engagement via click-through rate, improve the return on ad spend via sales leads or transactions, and make each dollar in the budget go just a little farther. In national campaigns, it may sometimes be a little bit harder to find pockets of wasted spend, like geographic targets for example, but in local campaigns with a laser focus, inefficiencies are easier to spot and/or avoid. If the budget is tight and you can’t afford to spend money on clicks, you have to optimize toward what works.

How to Optimize for Local PPC

Source: Google Ads Manager user interface

In terms of local PPC, the biggest way to optimize campaigns would be to focus on performance by geographic area. More often than not, when you dig into the data, you’ll find these areas of opportunity. In Google Ads, location reporting provides insights into not 

only your targeted locations but also your matched locations (where activity has been attributed to). Reviewing these location reports is a great way to discover new pockets of results-driving zip codes or DMAs, which can be leaned into with a positive bid modifier to increase traffic, or conversely, excluded from your campaign altogether if they are wasting budget by not driving conversions. Additional geographic reporting available in Google Ads includes the distance report, which shows how the distance from a location impacts search ad performance.

Here are a few reasons why optimizing for location is so crucial in PPC:

• Nearly 30% of searches for something in a specific location will result in a purchase (Source: Valve and Meter, via Google).
• In 2020, 93% of Americans used the Web to find local businesses. (Source: BrightLocal)
• Almost one-third of all searches made on mobile phones are location-based (Source: The SEM Post).

Source: Crimson Park Digital

There is so much more to local campaigns than just their location settings, however, a huge factor that contributes to performance is intent, via localized keywords. These are phrases that not only include the words “near me,” “local,” or “nearby,” but also zip codes, town names, and other localized signals that show “near me” intent.  

Did you know? 

• 82% of smartphone users are actively searching for businesses near them (Source: Search Engine Land)
• 76% of people who search for something nearby on a smartphone will visit a business within one day (Source: Google)
• Almost 70% of searchers on mobile will call a business using a link from the search (Source: PowerTraffick, via Google).

Localized searches are not just siloed to mobile, even with such strong mobile statistics,  it really depends on the industry, offerings, business, and how that type of customer behaves by device. Is your business in higher demand when customers are already on the go? Or are your services something that needs extensive research ahead of time, before leaving home? These are questions to ask before dialing up the mobile bid adjustments. 59% of consumers still prefer to search for local information on a desktop versus other smart devices.