You may find that your business flourishes in particular parts of the world. For example, a company selling snow boots probably sells more stock to people who live on high mountains than people who live on sunny beaches. Performance data in your Google Ads account can help you identify those geographic areas, so that you can decide where to focus more of your advertising efforts and budget.
In this article, you’ll learn about the different reports in Google Ads that can help you understand how your ads are doing in different locations.
Locations reports
If you’ve already applied your location targeting settings and your campaigns have been running for a while, you can track performance by location in the ‘Locations’ report.
You can view data for two different types of location views. The locations reported here are aggregated across users:
- 'Targeted locations' view: Shows your performance by the locations that you targeted.
- 'Matched locations' view: Shows your performance based on the locations where your ads appeared. These locations could be users’ physical locations or locations of interest.
Note: The 'Targeted locations' and 'Matched locations' views are also available in report editor.
Your location reports let you view your ad performance at the most specific level available for targeting. In other words, if you were targeting the UK, you could view location data down to the postcode, university, airport or electoral district level. This gives you a more detailed view of the locations where your campaigns are performing well. Bear in mind that your location reports can only show data about location target types within the country that you’re targeting.
Find out more about how to view your location reports.
Distance reports
If you’ve already added location assets, you can view performance data for your ads with location assets. Your data will be organised by the distance between the location that triggered your ad and your closest business location. The location that triggered your ad could be your potential customer's physical location, or the location that they'd shown interest in through searches or content that they'd viewed. Find out how you can view distance reports for your Search Network and Shopping campaigns.
Say that you own a bricks-and-mortar shop and you see on your distance report that your ads have a higher conversion rate from people within five miles of your location. Using radius targeting and location bid adjustments, you can increase your bids for customers with a physical location within a 5-mile radius.
Geographic performance columns and values
When you view geographic data in your statistics table, you may also find the following columns and details:
Most specific location
The 'Most specific location' column shows the most detailed information that we have about the location that was used to match your ads. This location may either be your potential customer's physical location or a location that they’ve shown interest in. The most specific location varies by country depending on the level of geographic targeting available.
Unspecified areas
You may notice some data from "Unspecified" areas in your report. There are a number of reasons why an area where your ad showed might be unspecified:
- IP address or search query: We can't determine the location from the IP address, and the search query didn't indicate interest in a recognised location.
- Multiple cities/regions in Google Maps: The search was performed on Google Maps within a large geographic area that included several cities or regions.
Variation in geographic reporting numbers
The geographic data in your Google Ads statistics table may vary somewhat from other data in your account or sources such as third-party tracking or web logs. Here are a few possible reasons why the data may vary:
- Campaign or billing summary: Performance data may vary slightly from data in your campaign summary or billing summary because our data collection techniques can vary. For invoicing and campaign spend, use the reports in Billing
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- IP addresses: IP addresses are routinely re-assigned, and Google Ads updates its IP data regularly to reflect these changes. Third-party tracking providers may update their IP data on a different schedule.
- Invalid clicks: Google Ads filters out invalid clicks, so the number of clicks per geographic area may differ from that shown by other data sources.
- Location of interest: Google Ads may pick up on locations that a potential customer has shown interest in, which other data sources may not be able to detect.
- Other sources of traffic: Third-party tracking providers may count all sources of traffic to your site, instead of just Google Ads traffic. For example, let's say that Google Ads generates 50 visits to your site, but your site has a total of 100 visits from all sources. Google Ads will only report on the 50 clicks from Google Ads traffic.
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