QuickTip Time : Adwords International Traffic

What’s up guys. I’m heading back home later today and then Monday I’ll be back to normal blogging, but I didn’t want to leave this blog feeling empty so I’m posting a quick tip. I learned this maybe a month ago and it’s helped one of my campaigns make an extra $500 profit/day, so if you don’t know this trick maybe it can help you as well.

So about a month ago when I was posting about Adwords, I talked about how I had a big campaign running and gave some of my experiences with it. A few weeks after it was running, I realized I was getting an INSANE amount of international redirects to another offer. With a landing page CTR of about 60%, on the last day before I implemented the trick, I had over 800 international redirects. That’s redirects after they clicked through. I was losing a lot of money because of this, and had to figure out why.

I look in my campaign and see that I’m targeting the US only…no problems there that’s what I want. But for some reason analytics shows traffic from over 80 countries or something like that. So I call up Adwords and express my displeasure with international traffic, and the girl looks through my account and says “It’s not something on our end. In all my years working here I’ve never seen a US only campaign bring in international traffic.” Yeah…right. Here’s where the trick comes in: I went into my campaigns and instead of targeting just the United States, I targeted each individual 50 states. The next day my international traffic was nearly nonexistent. I went from 800 international clicks a day to 10-20.

To do this, just go into Campaign Settings, and then change the Geotargeting. Change it from continents to City/Region or something like that, and just go through and manually add all 50 states to the list and save it. Hopefully that cuts your international traffic down a bit and puts some more money in your pocket.