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.

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November 11th, 2007 at 1:10 pm
Mad tips! Thanks Uber! I just did a shout out on my blog:
http://www.bloggingsponsorships.blogspot.com
for you. Would you be interested in doing a blogroll link exchange?
November 11th, 2007 at 2:17 pm
[...] mileage may vary… Paul at Uber Affiliate shared a tip with me about GeoTargeting at Ad:tech and then blogged about it [...]
November 11th, 2007 at 3:15 pm
It is usually the small things that equal big chances. Thanks for sharing this gem of knowledge with the world.
November 12th, 2007 at 9:29 am
Again good looking. This is a nice little bit of info to have.
November 12th, 2007 at 10:12 am
Nice tip! I’ve always selected US only.
November 12th, 2007 at 8:55 pm
Great Tip! :) Thanks
November 13th, 2007 at 8:57 am
Can I have the keywords that brought you international traffic and the countries they came from?
November 13th, 2007 at 9:52 am
Good tip. Thanks
November 14th, 2007 at 3:45 am
As usual, Adwords isn’t always as accurate is you would expect it to be. Do you find your conversion tracking to be reasonably accurate?
November 15th, 2007 at 11:22 am
What an important information for all of us interested in international business.
November 15th, 2007 at 8:17 pm
[...] Adwords International Traffic- This tip is from UberAffiliate.com, a great blog by a PPC marketer. He is the last interview I am trying to get for the week. His tip is about international traffic and adwords, and what to do with international re-directs. [...]
November 17th, 2007 at 2:57 am
[...] Have you ever started a campaign in Google Adwords and noticed that even though you have your geo-targeting set to US only, you were still receiving a lot of international clicks? Paul over at UberAffiliate wrote a great post on preventing international clicks in adwords. [...]
November 17th, 2007 at 11:25 pm
This is wierd I never had a problem like this..
February 28th, 2008 at 2:56 pm
That’s a great tip. Thanks! I always wondered if this was happening in my account.
March 12th, 2008 at 11:08 pm
[...] AND Canada, so a ton of guys are wasting money on Canadian traffic. Another mistake I guess is the international targeting Adwords secret I sort of stumbled upon. This can add up to a lot of wasted [...]
May 6th, 2008 at 5:28 pm
[...] posts about an interesting glitch with Adwords & International Traffic. This personally isn’t something I’ve ever experienced but as he mentions, it really [...]