For nationwide campaigns, there is a little used Google Adwords report that provides amazing insight into the perfomance of your campaign by geographic region. This report allows you to drill down to metro areas and determine which areas are producing the most conversions and leads or sales. This is beneficial because it allows you to separate poor performing metro areas from the better performing areas, which should decrease your cost per click and your cost per conversion. This also gives you the information needed to setup campaigns by regions in which you know there is stronger performance.
The performance statistics available on these geographic reports include impressions, clicks, CTR, average CPC and cost. The report offers these attributes, Country/Territory, Region, Metro, City, Ad Distribution, Daily Budget, Ad Variation, Ad Group Status, Campaign Status and Ad Delivery Channel. Plus it can be broken out into Campaign or Ad Group level. The one negative is that this report only allows for a daily breakdown where it would also be useful to view the weekly or monthly data over a long period of time.
The best way to analyze the data is to download the information into Microosft Excel and set up a pivot table. This will allow you to analyze all of the available metrics by geographic area. If you are not familiar with how to use pivot table, here is a short, detailed tutorial. Using the Google Adwords Geographical Performance Report will allow you to quickly focus your campaigns into smaller campaigns that perform better and provide a higher ROI for your PPC spend.
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