New regions and cities now available for targeting on AdWords

Starting today and over the coming weeks, we’ll be rolling out city targeting in 17 additional countries to help you reach more customers in local markets with your AdWords campaigns. With this expansion, city targeting will now be available to AdWords advertisers in 34 countries. In addition, we’re also announcing the ability to target regions in Argentina.

The countries with new city and region targeting options in AdWords are (click to see the full list):

Argentina (region targeting only), Austria, Brazil, China (coming soon), Colombia, Czech Republic, Finland (coming soon), Hungary (coming soon), Malaysia, Mexico, Morocco, New Zealand, Nigeria, Norway, Poland, South Korea, Switzerland, Ukraine

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Location targeting helps you tailor your ads towards specific markets, analyze your AdWords campaigns by market, and optimize your campaigns for higher return-on-investment. Now, you can go a level deeper and optimize the performance of your AdWords campaign at the city level. For example, let’s say you run a clothing company and have stores in several cities in Mexico. You conduct a campaign-level analysis and learn that you're getting more conversions from big cities such as Mexico City than rural areas. Here are a few steps that you can take to optimize your AdWords campaign:

1. Run an AdWords geographic report or Analytics report to determine where your users are located and where you’re getting your most valuable traffic.
2. Adjust your campaign setup:
• Run a campaign targeting the best-performing cities such as Mexico City, and increase the bids on the keywords in that campaign to maximize your ad impressions in those cities.
• Consider setting up a regionally- (or nationally-) targeted campaign with potentially lower bids on the same keywords to capture additional traffic from outside your top-performing cities at a lower cost.
3. Adjust bids accordingly to optimize for the highest campaign ROI.

We hope that with the expansion of city targeting, advertisers in more countries will be able to reach their local customers more effectively. Visit our Help Center to learn more about getting started with this feature.

Posted by Gordon Zhu, Inside AdWords crew

International tourists find the Polish seaside through Google AdWords

Sebastian Hejnowski’s parents built the Villa Zdroj Bed and Breakfast in 2002 to share Poland’s beauty with weary travelers. Located in Miedzyzdroje, a city on the coast of Polish island Wolin, Villa Zdroj is one of the island’s first modern bed and breakfasts.

Sebastian’s parents handle reservations, property development and sometimes breakfast. Sebastian runs the advertising efforts for his parents’ Villa, including Google AdWords. “When we first started our AdWords campaigns, we focused on Poland but we soon realized that there was increasing interest from our neighboring countries,” says Sebastian. When he noticed an upward trend in drop-in visitors from other countries, he decided to launch campaigns across Poland’s borders as well.

Villa Zdroj

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According to Sebastian, the variety of outdoor activities combined with the relatively inexpensive cost of Polish tourism make Wolin a vacation paradise for Germans and Scandinavians. “Germans and Scandinavians were coming to Miedzyzdroje, but mostly staying in expensive five-star hotels,” says Sebastian. “B&B’s were never an option since they didn’t know where to find them.” So Sebastian made Denmark, Germany, Norway and Sweden his first international targets. The strategy proved correct: “We were one of the first Polish B&B’s to create a website in English. When we targeted an AdWords campaign to these people, they started calling and booking reservations.”

As time went on, Sebastian noticed that Poland had become more and more accessible to Europeans due to an increase in flights to the area. To capitalize on this trend, Sebastian expanded his AdWords campaigns even beyond bordering countries. “With time we extended the campaign to the Great Britain and the Netherlands.” says Sebastian. “Europeans tend to explore new places and travel extensively.”

Sebastian with his family
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Today, foreigners account for more than half of Villa Zdroj’s guests. And Sebastian estimates that up to 60% of those international guests book Villa Zdroj because they found his AdWords ads.

Thanks to his effective targeting, Sebastian now sells out all of the villa’s rooms during peak summer travel season. He adjusts his ad campaigns to reflect availability: “In summer, we track vacancies and adjust our campaigns accordingly. We pause the campaigns if we’re booked a few weeks out.”

In 2012, Poland will host the Euro Cup and Sebastian’s dad is already getting ready for an influx of visitors. “My father is considering buying a big projector so everyone can watch the games together in the communal room,” says Sebastian. “We’re already excited to share the Polish seaside with more out of town visitors!”

Learn more about Villa Zdroj Bed and Breakfast and Sebastian’s successes online in this short video (it's in Polish, but you can view captions).

Posted by Nathania Lozada, Inside AdWords crew