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.


13 Comments

  1. November 11, 2007

    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?

  2. November 11, 2007

    It is usually the small things that equal big chances. Thanks for sharing this gem of knowledge with the world.

  3. November 12, 2007

    Again good looking. This is a nice little bit of info to have.

  4. November 12, 2007

    Nice tip! I’ve always selected US only.

  5. November 12, 2007

    Great Tip! :) Thanks

  6. November 13, 2007

    Can I have the keywords that brought you international traffic and the countries they came from?

  7. November 13, 2007

    Good tip. Thanks

  8. November 14, 2007

    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?

  9. November 15, 2007

    What an important information for all of us interested in international business.

  10. November 17, 2007

    This is wierd I never had a problem like this..

  11. February 28, 2008

    That’s a great tip. Thanks! I always wondered if this was happening in my account.

  12. June 14, 2010

    Great tip. I’ll have to give this one a try later today.

  13. February 18, 2012

    22. My brother recommended I might like this website. He was totally right. This post actually made my day. You can not imagine simply how much time I had spent for this information! Thanks!

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