A few months ago, I was out of my office for an appointment with a client in downtown Montreal. Since I knew (well, I thought I knew!) how Google Adwords IP geotargeting system worked, I wanted to give him a demo with a concrete example. I used, as my example, my own firm's Adwords campaign, which had the keyword “conception web” (translation: “web design”) geotargeting the Quebec province (Canda's only French-speaking region). Since I was in Quebec, I presumed it would show up on nearly all Quebec computers, no matter the ISP.
But, when we tried from the client's office, we couldn’t get the ad to show! I called the office, and they checked my bids and NVI was still on the first PPC spot in Quebec location on “conception web”.
I didn’t understand the problem at that time, but it seemed that the only difference between the testing done at my client's office and the one made by my colleague at our office was the ISP. My client was connected to the Internet with Bell/Sympatico (on ADSL), one of the two leaders in Quebec and my office with Videotron (Cable), the other leading ISP company.
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I couldn’t believe that most of Bell/Sympatico’s Quebec customers (at least 40-50% of Quebec total ISP residential / commercial market) connections were not taken into account. So, we did a real test to understand and explain this phenomenon. Here’s the test:
IP: 70.49.203.251 (one of the 10 IP’s we’ve tested)
Location : Montreal
Test we’ve done: For one of our customers, we’ve selected Quebec as the geographical target for a keyword and tried to have it show up on Google.ca with several Bell/Sympatico ISP clients. We’ve also done the same test with the keyword “conception web”, and we couldn’t get our ad to show up for those Bell/Sympatico users. This probably means that we have selected “Quebec” in your geographical target for your existing French Adwords campaign. The main problem is that most of the Bell/Sympatico IPs are pointing to servers located in Ottawa and Toronto, which are in Ontario province, despite the fact the clients are located in Quebec province.
Problem: Ads not showing in Google-sponsored links because the IP is resolved in Ontario. This is caused because many Bell/Sympatico ISP servers delivering the Internet connection to Quebec residents are located in Ottawa and Toronto, and Google thinks the customers are located in Ontario and therefore won’t show the ads to them.
The Big Issue: I don’t think Google is aware of it, so most of the Google campaigns you will run for French & English keywords will not show up in Quebec province for most/all of Bell/Sympatico Internet users if you have selected “Quebec” as your geographical target.
This basically means that you are not targeting half of the already small French market! Way to go!
Google advertising reach a lot less French consumers in Quebec, and Google loses a lot of money through its pay-per-click system in Quebec because it doesn’t serve Bell/Sympatico ISP clients.
How to overcome this obstacle?
The best solution we found is to create a copy of your existing French PPC campaign but by targeting Ontario as a geographical target, you can dramatically boost your PPC impressions and clicks for Quebec province without hurting too much your quality since most of Ontario residents won't search for terms in French. On the other hand, to reach Anglophones in Quebec, you have to target Anglophones in Ontario as well, which is not a viable solution for advertising campaign targeted only for Quebec.
What is Google's position on this issue?
In March, we sent a brief note through the Google Help Center. Google answered that it can't do anything since Bell/Sympatico has chosen to implement its servers outside Quebec. That surprised me a lot, since I was giving Google an insight that is worth at least several hundreds thousands of advertising dollars… for FREE. Maybe it didn't get to the right person!
p.s. from Rand - If any SEOmozzers think they can slip the AdWords folks a note during study hall, I'm sure they'd appreciate the several million extra dollars in ad revenue?
p.p.s. from Guillaume - The French version of this Google article is available on Go-Referencement.org
I've got huge geotargeting problems with Google (not Yahoo or any other service - they work fine). My arin-validated IP address is square in the center of Arkansas USA (Windstream's IPs are all there) yet Google is serving me with U.K. ads and defaulting my search to Google UK. I don't seem to have made any progress getting them to make an adjustment.
It's a nightmare, as it also ignores my country setting in my Google account. (I've got personalized search turned off). I'm having to do my work via proxy. My IP is in this netrange
NetRange: 75.88.0.0 - 75.91.255.255 CIDR: 75.88.0.0/14 NetName: WINDSTREAMNetHandle: NET-75-88-0-0-1Parent: NET-75-0-0-0-0NetType: Direct AllocationOrgName: Windstream Communications Inc OrgID: WINDS-6Address: 4001 Rodney Parham RdCity: Little RockStateProv: ARPostalCode: 72212Country: US
aggghhhhh!!!!
Geotargeting is anything but perfect. Here in Atlanta, Google shows users from a major ISP to be in New York City. When I turned geotargeting off for one of my clients, our leads went up across the board...in areas that were actually in our geo list.
Geotargeting is nice, but definitely keep in mind that it has some noticeable issues.
I see this all the time while I'm surfing around... I'm on Bell Sympatico at home and the IP-sensitive ads I see (dating, mostly) have diffent cities all the time... Sometimes I appear to be in Quebec City, sometimes London, often Toronto (I live in none of those places) and occassionally its correct - or close enough. My understanding is that this is due to Sympatico pooling its IPs and servers throughout Ontario & Quebec and because I don't have a static IP, I route through different servers day-to-day. I could be way off here, since I'm not strong on network/ISP knowledge, but I think this is more of a Bell problem than a Google problem. The very small AdWords campaign I run for a very local organization requires a province-wide geo-target since the majority of Bell customers will show up incorrectly.
Its not only an ISP problem, Google needs to do some work too. One sample is not a statistical universe, but I have a fixed IP and it hasn't changed in the 12 months we've been here, giving them plenty of time to figure out where I am. If they really wanted, they could look up my *mailing address* from my adsense records, against my IP address, and yet... My development server displays ads in (I think its) Japanese (*laughs*), and I see ads for the other side of the country when I surf.
And just so you know Cailean, I haven't succeeded in getting one ad to display for a Sympatico user out of the 10-12 IPs we've tested in different cities.
Another example is Montreal stockmarket building (Tour de la Bourse of Montreal). It has more than 3 000 people in it, and I can't get the ads to show to them, no matter if I select Quebec, Ontario or Canada. Maybe they're IPs are from New York ;)
I have the same problem with Northern Ireland.
It is very poor.
The only up side seems to be that if you include the location in your search, google seems to ignore your IP address and use common sense (sometimes).
e.g. if I search for "widgets northern ireland" the ad will come up even though my IP address is not located in Northern Ireland. (Although this does not seem to be the case for someone using AOL as an ISP for some bizarre reason)..
GeoIP has had its share of problems, I find when I am targeted this way in marketing the ad says I'm from Milton or some other place outside of Toronto. As frustrating as this can be when trying to deliver a message to a potential client, at least Milton is within proximity to Toronto, and not a province away, with huge cultural and linguistic differences.
I feel your frustration.
That being said, then Google should add "Quebec" as a country in the geo-targeting. lol! I have a mental cold.
haha..
I'm trying to think of something funny to say and relate it to Stephen Harper's "Quebec is a nation within Canada" statement - but I have a cold today so I'm low on sarcastic humour... *sniffle*...
Geo-targeting when it comes to regions (States, provinces or cities) is actually not very advanced. Honestly, there's not much Google can do about it. Since IP lookups only report on where the server is hosted, it would be up to the ISPs to report more detailed information. Short of investigating criminal activity, they probably save resources by only reporting the general IP location, rather than doing a trace and reporting the connection location.
As an advertiser, the best thing to do for regional ads is to create 3 campaigns. One that uses Google's geo-targeting for province/city. A second one narrowed down only to the country (usually more accurate), where you use regional keywords (i.e. Quebec conception web, Montreal conception web). The third would be country targeted and language specific. For example you get all of Canada, but only French language searches. If location is important, you can add it as a qualifier in the display ad so you don't get clicks from people not willing to work with a company outside their local area.
That's a good tip to maximise the likelihood of getting your ads displayed in a specific region.
This does seem to be a very common issue for ads geo-targeted to regions, I had the same problem when I was in Brisbane as my IP address was located in Melbourne.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't the US have this same issue with AOL users all having the same IPs?
Yet, in the US, Google has worked around this problems (possibly through their AOL parternship?). What's preventing a workaround in Quebec? Isn't it worth whatever haggling and discussions need to take place in order to reach a market of several million displaced searchers?
Hey Rand - At the SES Local Search Conference in Denver I asked Dominic Preuss, product manager for Google local, about getting geo-information from AOL.
To my astonishment, he said Google did not get any geo-data, other than the standard Reston, Virginia IP address, from AOL. So as of the end of September, Google could not accurately geographically target AdWords for AOL users.
Why should Google assume it's not in Montreal? Maxmind's data points directly to it: https://www.maxmind.com/app/locate_ip?ips=70.4..... I thought IP geotargeting based on the ISP's location was been dropped a long time ago. Are you certain that it was targeting Ottawa/Toronto? It should be easy to check with a proxy.
Even easier than hunting down an appropriate proxy and checking it using that, you can use Google's Ads Diagnostics Tool. That happens to show that 70.49.203.251 is in Quebec.
Maybe the problem Guillaume experienced was due to Sympatico's occasional reshuffling of its IP addresses and Google not catching up fast enough. As an example, you can see that mtl-hse-ppp170914.qc.sympatico.ca and bas5-toronto63-1096706732.dsl.bell.ca both resolve to the same IP address. The traceroute path and reverse PTR record of that one indicate it's assigned in Toronto right now, but Google thinks it's in Quebec.
I think overall Google is doing a very good job of handling geo-targeting at the regional level. It's hard for Google to make sense out of things when even Bell Sympatico is confused about the info!
And if you want to talk about a search engine that's losing out on a lot of Canadian advertising, Yahoo is the worst culprit. With no geo-targeting at all (pre-Panama), it has made no sense for anyone marketing solely to Canadians to use YSM. Thankfully, with the upcoming upgrade and the introduction of Yahoo! Canada Search Marketing that will change.
Hey Ghoti - Nice post. I think you know a little bit more than I do on how all of this GeoTargeting works, but keep in mind we have tried this scenario in all top5 major cities of Quebec province, and it always lead to the same results.
Also, when I toggle Ontario with my French keywords, I get a 50-60% Impressions extra, which makes me think this issue isn't solved. And, just for your information, this has been going on for more than 6 months...
P.S. Can you explain the what PTR means and maybe give a more detailed explanation of what you say? I think this would be a great post, or at least help me and the community deal better with this issue!
Thanks
Hi Guillaume - a PTR record is a reverse DNS record, in other words it lets you look up the "name" which belongs to an IP address. Not all IP addresses have a name, but many do. The name does not really tell you where the IP address is located, but sometimes it gives you clues. In this case, you can do a reverse DNS lookup over all important name servers at https://www.dnsstuff.com/tools/traversal.ch?do...(you can also do that manually with "nslookup"). Here you'll see 2 names (at least for the moment :-)): TOROON63NSZP05.SRVR.BELL.CA. and bas11-montrealak-1177668603.dsl.bell.ca. (sounds like Toronto and Montreal). You can trace it a bit with "tracert" (or traceroute) and check the names that come up - most companies use location descriptive names (not always + not always up to date).
As ghoti said, sometimes ISPs will dynamically allocate IP addresses for the whole net, regardless of where the user is physically located. That is something Google can't "fix" - it can't know where the ISP moved the IP address this time. In general the ISP will keep local IP pools - but in theory he could use the same IP pool world-wide, using the same number in Germany and a week (or an hour) later in China.
I see the same problem down here in Australia, albeit without the French-speaking twist :) Its very difficult to determine a person's location for about 50% of Internet users - the ISPs are nationwide. Personally, Google seems to beleive I am in Melbourne, around 2500 km south of where I actually am :( This leads to annoyingly off topic ads for location-specific items.
One suggestion for How To Fix It is for Google to specifically Ask people where they are, eg - in their Google accounts - perhaps as quick popup quizes here and there in their services It wouldn't take them long to build a useful IP-locations DB and the value would be overwhelming.
Heck, another suggestion, theres a 20% project for someone - we know they track what we visit where, use that data to algorithmically guess a person's location. This doesn't seem to happen now.
Alternatively, they could enter partnerships with the larger ISPs to get more info on what IPs are allocated where. I'd bet money there is a pattern to it.
I know seeing ads for Melbourne businesses means I never click through. No clicks = no income. Easy.
In some cases, another way to pick up on potentially missed searches is to run a duplicate of the PPC campaign (of French keywords) with the Target Audience set to English.