Geotargeting: How to Find the Right Customers for Your Brand

Today we are going to talk about geo-targeting advice with our team. So before we do that, don't forget to rate, review, subscribe, whatever platform you're on. It helps a lot. Without further ado, let's go ahead and check out what my team has to say. Thanks, Eric.

Hi, I'm Andrew Bloom with Single Grain, and today I'm talking directly to all marketers who might be running a geo-targeting campaign anywhere in the national US. So that could be a national campaign or just a handful of states. Anything that has national scope. And I want you to watch this because you're probably making a newbie mistake that can really mess up your geo-targeting, that is causing you to reach the wrong people in the wrong places and is diminishing the effectiveness of your bid mods. And it's going to impact you and your campaigns regardless of the bidding strategy you use. If you're using smart bidding, manual bidding, scripted bidding, doesn't matter. This is about how we actually go and target our campaigns not at all about how we adjust them or bid on them. Recently, we were speaking to a client of ours based in Canada, and they wanted to target all of the US but also emphasize particularly large and growing startup tech hubs like San Francisco, California, Austin, Texas, Provo, Utah. And they were asking us, well, how do we approach this? Do we target states? Do we target these cities? Now, the problem with targeting by states is you may overshoot. You're speaking to a lot more people than are in your target market. But especially in these startup hubs where you might have a lot of commuters, for example, if you target by the city boundary definitions, you might actually be excluding a lot of people who live outside of your target regions. You might only be hitting them at work. Moreover, there's something cognitively dissonant about targeting by US state boundaries in digital marketing, right? These state borders, as you see here behind me, they're artificial, they're not market-oriented, they're usually old, they're relics of there was a colony here or a railroad here, and that's how we get the states that we see. Instead, we need a map or a schematic for geo-targeting the US, carving up the US into regions that make sense from a marketing perspective. So I'd like you to get familiar with the geo-targeting method that the pros use, which is the Nielsen DMA zone schematic. Now, instead of 50 states, this schematic actually chops up the US into 210 individual market regions. For example, we can zoom in on, let's say, Ohio here, and we can see you're not gonna be targeting the state of Ohio, you're gonna be going a little bit deeper. You might wanna target Dayton and Columbus, but not Cleveland, Akron, not Toledo. Gives you a lot more resolution than state-by-state targeting. Now, this has been our preferred method of geo-targeting national campaigns for the last few years. And especially here at Single Grain, we've seen up to a 30% increase in geo-optimization efficiency just by switching to this method of geo-targeting schematics versus state-by-state models. So where do these zones actually come from, right? Even though we can target them in Google Ads, they're not at all Google's original invention or even a new one. Remember television? Back in the '50s, Nielsen began surveying households on their television watching habits and correlated them with other factors like market consumption data, demographic data, and created the first ever true marketing map of America. And they were able to come away with an answer to the first question of, what are my ratings? How many people are watching my TV show? What is my reach of my advertising? Fortunately, in the digital age, the technology powering this has evolved considerably, but we still have the same schematic for geotargeting. That Nielsen developed decades ago. Now Nielsen actually partners with Google to provide these zones and making them targetable to advertisers free of charge. There's no signup, there's no enrollment, there's no application. It's just there natively in the platform and you can target it right now for any of your campaigns. And this is actually an interesting example of one of the last few external DMPs that are partnered with Google that you don't have to go through a fancy application process for. Probably because there's nothing controversial about these. It's just another way of looking at the map. So what are some advantages of using DMA zones as your primary approach to targeting within the US? I'm gonna give you 4. First, more zones equals more granularity. Patterns will emerge much more quickly without getting lost in the weeds if you geo-target deeper versus if you go even deeper looking at counties, cities, cities, zip codes, yeah, you can get technically more precision, but you're gonna be so inundated with data, you're gonna be unable to actually optimize effectively. The DMA zones are just a nice balance of size versus precision. Second, the DMA zones are actually grounded in marketing and consumer data. The US boundary shapes don't actually represent inherently meaningful boundaries between dissimilar consumers. There's nothing that separates people on this side of Colorado and this side of Kansas on this border. There's nothing inherently different about those people when it comes to how they go ahead and shop. But we can actually see Nielsen has found some overlap regions where there actually are those differences. And if you were targeting state by state, you would miss out on that and you'd have less precision in your targeting. So if you're wondering why the DMA zones are shaped the way they are, it's because Nielsen knows that's how people consume. If you're wondering why the US states are shaped the way they are, I have an excellent History Channel show for you. Thirdly, targeting the US DMA zones unlocks more efficient optimization. The big US states can often conceal dozens of different competing market trends that will obscure one another and overwrite your data with meaningless signals. For example, more often than not, what works in Southern California isn't the same as what works in Northern California. East Texas versus West Texas. Rural New York versus New York City. You're going to want to zoom in deeper and capture these changes. These are patterns that you're going to be missing if you're only looking at an entire US state based on the map. And lastly, the Nielsen DMA zones are always updating. Nielsen updates these regions every 2 or 3 years in accordance with new data, and it revises the maps to reflect actually new and emerging market behaviors, behaviors that might shift these lines one way or another. Okay, so when does this not work? When should you maybe choose US state targeting instead of DMA zones? Well, very rarely, but sometimes we still see digital marketing campaigns being pegged to traditional marketing campaigns in some respect. For example, some advertisers are going to require that a certain amount of ad dollars get spent in each region, usually to support a team of salespeople who need to ensure that they all have their own turf and it's all treated fairly, or for legal purposes. You have to use a state-by-state grid to ensure that ad dollars are going exactly where they are permitted to be going. This is very frequent in pharma advertising, for example. And only in those scenarios are you going to be boxed out of using DMA zone targeting, or especially when you wanna just be super sure that your dollars are going to a state, not some complex grid that someone is, you know, outside of marketing is probably not gonna understand. But beyond that, we have seen DMA zone targeting be vastly more effective than US state targeting in virtually every Google campaign that we've run. So that's my spiel for today. I hope you've had an interesting revelation here seeing how the pros do geo-targeting. So let me know in the comments, are you going to continue to use state-by-state targeting for your national campaigns? Are you gonna try out the Nielsen DMA zones? Love to hear all about it. If you have any questions, let me know in the comments, but for now, back to you, Eric.

Alright, so I hope you enjoyed that. Don't forget to leave a comment no matter what platform you're on. And don't forget to check out the next clip, and we'll see you tomorrow.

Bye.