Discover v201101 - Advanced geo-targeting using Location of Presence or Area of Interest

AdWords allows you to target your users based on their Location of Presence (LOP) or Area of Interest (AOI). This feature is now available to developers through AdWords API v201101 and this blog post discusses how to use this new AdWords API feature.

This blog post assumes that are familiar with how to set geographic targets on your campaign. If not, you can learn more here. For a refresher on where regionally targeted ads appear, you can refer to the AdWords Help Center article here.

Introduction

To understand how LOP or AOI based geo-targeting works, consider the following example:

You own a flower shop in New York. You run a campaign that targets New York, and one of your keywords is “flowers”. The following table shows how Google serves ads if you use LOP and AOI settings.

Target Method	User Location (LOP)	User Query	User’s Area of Interest (AOI)	User sees Ad
LOP only	New York	flowers
	California	flowers in New York	New York
AOI only	New York	flowers
	California	flowers in New York	New York
LOP and AOI	New York	flowers
	California	flowers in New York	New York

You can get or set LOP and AOI based geo-targeting through the settings field of your campaign using the GeoTargetTypeSetting class. The following C# code snippet shows how to set AOI based geo-targeting for your campaign.

long campaignId = long.Parse(_T("INSERT_CAMPAIGN_ID_HERE"));

// Create campaign with updated budget.
Campaign campaign = new Campaign();
campaign.id = campaignId;

// Set GeoTargetType.
GeoTargetTypeSetting geoSetting = new GeoTargetTypeSetting();
geoSetting.positiveGeoTargetType =
GeoTargetTypeSettingPositiveGeoTargetType.AREA_OF_INTEREST;
campaign.settings = new Setting[] {geoSetting};

// Create operation.
CampaignOperation operation = new CampaignOperation();
operation.@operator = Operator.SET;
operation.operand = campaign;

// Update campaign.
CampaignReturnValue retVal = campaignService.mutate((new CampaignOperation[] {operation}));

GeoTargetTypeSetting can also be used to geo-target negatively. You can do negative geo-targeting based on LOP alone, or both LOP and AOI. To understand how negative GeoTargetTypeSetting works, consider the following modified version of the previous example:

You run a campaign that targets all of the US, but excludes New York, and one of your keywords is “flowers”. The following table shows how Google serves ads based on your settings.

Target Method	User Location (LOP)	User Query	User’s Area of Interest (AOI)	User sees Ad
LOP only	New York	flowers
	California	flowers in New York	New York
	Texas	flowers
LOP and AOI	New York	flowers
	California	flowers in New York	New York
	Texas	flowers

The following code snippet shows how to apply negative GeoTargetTypeSetting based on LOP:

// Set GeoTargetType.
GeoTargetTypeSetting geoSetting = new GeoTargetTypeSetting();
geoSetting.negativeGeoTargetType =
GeoTargetTypeSettingNegativeGeoTargetType.LOCATION_OF_PRESENCE;
campaign.settings = new Setting[] {geoSetting};

A few points worth noting about GeoTargetTypeSetting:

• This setting applies only to ads targeting the Google Search Network, and does not affect ads targeting the Google Display Network.
• This setting applies only within a country where we determine the user is physically located based on their device location (such as an IP address). For example, if you have targeted New York for your ads, then the ad would not show for a user in London searching for flowers in New York.
• Even if you have a negative LOP based targeting for a certain area, your campaign's geographic reports may still show impressions from your excluded area. This is because we report a physical location for users whose search didn't include a location of interest, and we generally report the user's location of search intent if their search includes one.

We have added support for LOP and AOI based geotargetting in all of our client libraries, so please take advantage of this new feature and share your feedback with us on the forum.

  --Anash P. Oommen, AdWords API Team