Geo-Targeting can be a lot of work if you do it the precise way, i.e. determine sales-figures and advertising expenses per area and compare it for every area and only keep advertsing in areas which make a profit.
But, if you don’t have time for that, there is a simpler, not-so-exact way, but it should also have a major impact on your ratio between sales and avertising expenses:
1. Take a summary of your sales sorted or grouped by country, of say, the last three years. Most ecommerce providers have such reports.
2. Make a list of countries which you make sales in. Don’t include countries where sales numbers are very low compared to the size of the country.
3. In your Google-Adwords account, select only the countries from your list. (If you have many campaigns then I suggest to use the Google Adwords Editor and use the copy-paste feature
Depending on how fast you work and on how many campaigns and sales you have, this exercise usually takes between 15 Minutes and one hour.
But it can help a lot with your bottom line because it eliminates all those countries from your advertising expenses where you do not make any sales at all or where sales numbers are way too low to be able to make a profit there.
Especially nowadays, where sales-conversion can, in some markets, be severely affected by the current economic crisis, you have to do much more to optimize and keep your advertising focused on activities which bring in paying customers. It may make the difference between making a loss and making a profit and it may determine the survival of your business.
Also, acting fast is necessary because you can’t tolerate cash-bleeing of your business nowadays for even a short time. Therefore, a crude, fast exercise as outlined above can be much more effective than doing a perfectionisic exercise over the course of many months (or procrastinating about it because it takes soo much work.)
If you wait too long, there may be no business left to be saved. So, forget about perfectionism and do what works right now.
I hope this helps some of you,
Chris
P.S.: I just did this exercise today. Maybe I’ll post some results here…