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Google search partners is targeting traffic from non-targeted geos
Posted by on December 18, 2022 at 6:12 pmHey all, I’ve recently had several complaints from clients saying they are getting leads from outside of their targeted areas. Here is the interesting part. When I check the G ads locations report for all of these clients the user locations all say they are searches originating from the areas we have selected as targeting. But I randomly was looking at the geo’s in google analytics and this report is showing totally different data and saying that in fact there is a high percentage of traffic coming from different states and even countries.
I haven’t noticed this issue until maybe 6 months ago, but not sure when its started. Anyway as a rule of thumb I’m discontinuing search partners on all of my local targeted accounts.
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1 Reply
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Yup, noticed the same thing with pmax having all states and international excluded and only targeting in our target area and exclude people in or interested in excluded. Google ads shows normal, analytics showed some from international, no idea on accuracies but tend to believe analytics, no answer from Google support.
I have a feeling optimized targeting ( since that ignores any targeting or exclusions youvset in the canpaign) or the dynamic assets may play a factor, or some other hidden setting that was auto enabled without our knowledge.
Quite annoying trying to tighten up traffic for local guys now.
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Analytics attributes using a non-direct click attribution. If a user is served an ad in your targeted area then visits the website again from a different area the source of that second session will get attributed to your ad even though the session did not originate from an ad click. Check what portion of your traffic is coming from returning site visitors, it might help shed light on the discrepancies.
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Was this with Atlanta as a negative location?
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Recently I’ve noticed you must exclude all goes that you are not actively targeting, and switch the geo targeting from “presence or interest in” to “presence in” to fix this issue
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Presence or interest has caused this issue since the beginning of Google. That has always been known. I’ve been running ads for 10 years, never seen this wild of mis-geo targeting in search due to search partners.
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This happened to us a while ago (also out of the blue, but i solved for it). This can happen if there isn’t enough search volume to fill up your budget. I suggest to test your ad with the setting of presence in that location (“Presence: People in or regularly in your targeted locations), instead of presence OR interest. Once we changed this, we got clicks only for the chosen location (there was enough search volume). Later we actually switched back to presence or interest. Maybe Google had enough data to actually run it for the targeted area.Alternatively, if you are seeing that the bulk of the traffic is coming from one or two wierd locations, you can add them to the locations to exclude. Like anything with PPC, monitor after you make the changes and optimize. As mentioned in the other comments – do not include Google search partners, or display Networks for you “Networks” setting. That will definitely get you ‘shitty clicks’.
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