Boosting conversion rate with location targeting in Google Ads

Ad copy relevance is critical to paid search performance, especially in competitive markets. But how do you maintain relevance when campaigns are split by geography? This is where location targeting in Google Ads can have a measurable impact, particularly when executed through tactics like location inserts.  

What role do location inserts play?

Location inserts allow advertisers to dynamically tailor responsive search ad copy based on a user’s location, regular locations, or locations of interest. By aligning ad messaging with a searcher’s local context, brands can improve relevance, click-through rate, and ultimately conversion rate.  

The challenge of targeting at scale

The campaigns in one of our lead gen accounts are broken down by counties across the UK, and each of these has a high amount of competition. Using Greater Manchester as an example – this area has a lot of smaller towns, so using a headline such as ‘Manchester Windows’ isn’t specific enough. This is where location-based ad copy became a strategic opportunity. With location inserts, we were able to dynamically tailor messaging to the user’s specific town or area, whether that was Stockport, Salford, or Oldham. This approach supported a more precise local targeting strategy without the need to create hundreds of static ads.  

Before location inserts, searching from Oldham:

 

After location inserts, searching from Oldham: 

 

Testing a location targeting strategy

Greater Manchester was used as the test location due to its high levels of traffic and the diverse number of areas which can be targeted. Location Inserts were tested for 43 days using 50/50 experiments on both the Exact Match Keyword & Broad Match Keyword campaigns. This might seem like a long period of time, but it meant we were able to drive a significant amount of data through the experiments in order to determine significant results.  

Results: the impact on performance

The overall results were very positive, as there was an uplift across key metrics. CPC 

• • 18% lower on the Exact experiment
  • 5% lower on the Broad experiment

Conversions

• • 29% higher on the Exact experiment
  • 50% higher on the Broad experiment

CTR

• • 5.1% higher on the Exact experiment
  • 1.7% higher on the Broad experiment

Conversion Rate

• • 36% higher on the Exact experiment
  • 78% higher on the Broad experiment

Cost Per Conversion

• • 40% reduction on the Exact experiment
  • 47% reduction on the Broad experiment

 

Next steps for scaling location targeting in Google Ads

It was very interesting to see such a stark change in the conversion metrics, especially when adding a location insert was the only change that was made. This demonstrates how important ad messaging can be in a user’s conversion path as it helped to build that initial trust that the service they are searching for is available in their area. It was a no-brainer to roll this out across all locations for each product type. Utilising location inserts with unpinned headlines provides a really nice mix to what Google can put together – this is an alternative to using two static headlines if you also wanted to use keyword-based headlines.  

Connect with the team

If you want to learn more about how you can adopt a local approach into your Google Ads account, get in touch.