Hyper-local ads targeting made easy and automated with Radium

FEB 08, 2022

Posted by Álvaro Lamas, Natalija Najdova

Location targeting helps your advertising to focus on finding the right customers for your business. Are you, as a digital marketer, spending a lot of time optimizing your location targeting settings for your digital marketing campaigns? Are your ads running only in locations where you can deliver your services to your users or outside as well?

Read further to find out how Radium can help automate your digital marketing campaigns location targeting and make sure you only run ads where you deliver your services.

The location targeting settings challenge

Configuring accurate location targeting settings in Marketing Platforms like Google Ads allows your ads to appear in the geographic locations that you choose: countries, cities and zip codes OR radius around a location. As a result, precise geo targeting could help increase the KPIs of your campaigns such as the return on investment (ROI), the cost per acquisition (CPA) at high volumes, etc.

Mapping your business area to the available targeting options (country, city and zip code targeting or radius targeting) in Marketing Platforms is a challenge that every business doing online marketing campaigns has faced. This challenge becomes critical if you offer a service that is only available in a certain geographical area. This is particularly relevant for Food or Grocery Delivery Apps or organizations that run similar business models.

Adjusting these location targeting settings is a time consuming process. In addition, manually translating your business or your physical stores delivery areas into geo targeting settings is also an error prone process. And not having optimal targeting options might lead to ads shown to users that you cannot really deliver your services to, so you would likely lose money and time setting location targeting manually.

How can Radium help you?

Radium is a simple Web Application, based on App Scripts, that can save you money and time. Its UI helps you automatically translate a business area into radius targeting settings, one of the three options for geo targeting in Google Ads. It also provides you with an overview of the geographical information about how well the radius targeting overlaps with your business delivery area.

It has a few extra features like merging a few areas into one and generating the optimal radius targeting settings for those.

How does it work?

You can get your app deployed and running in less than an hour following these instructions. Once you’re done, in no time you can customize and improve your radius targeting settings to better meet your needs and optimize your marketing efforts.

Per delivery area that you provide, you will be able to visualize different circles in the UI, select one from the default circles or opt in for custom circle radius settings:

Large Circle: Pre-generated circle that englobes the rectangle that surrounds the targeting area
Small Circle: Pre-generated circle contained in the rectangle that surrounds the targeting area, touching its sides
Threshold Circle: Pre-generated circle with the minimum radius to cover at least the 90% of your delivery area, to maximize targeting and minimize waste

Custom Circle: Circle which center and radius can be customized manually by drag-and-drop and using the controls of the UI

Large Circle

Small Circle

Threshold Circle

Custom Circle

Take advantage of metrics to compare between all the radius targeting options and select the best fit for your needs. In red you can see the visualization of the business targeting area and, overlapped in gray, the generated radius targeting.

Metrics:

Radius: radius of the circle, in km
% Intersection: area of the Business Targeting Area inside the circle / total Business Targeting Area size
% Waste: area of circle excluding the Business Targeting Area / total Business Targeting Area size
Circle Size: area of the circle, in km²
Intersection Size: area of the Business Targeting Area, in km²
Waste Size: area of the circle excluding the Business Targeting Area, in km²
Circle Score: % Intersection - % Waste. The highest score represent the sweet spot, maximizing the targeting area and minimizing the waste area

Once you are done optimizing the radius settings, it’s time to activate them in your marketing campaigns. Radium offers you different ways of storing and activating this output, so you can use the one that better fits your needs:

Export your data to a Spreadsheet. This will allow you to have a mapping of readable names for each delivery area and its targeting settings, to generate the campaign settings in the csv format expected by Google Ads and to bulk upload them using Google Ads Editor
Directly download the csv file that can be uploaded to Google Ads via Google Ads Editor to bulk upload the settings of your campaigns
Upload them manually using the Google Ads UI

Find all the details about how to activate your location targeting settings in this step by step guide

Getting started with Radium

There are only 2 things you need to have in order to benefit from Radium:

Very easy to generate Maps JavaScript API Key
Map of your business’ delivery areas in either format:
- KML file representing the polygon shaped targeting areas (see sample file)
- CSV file with lat-lng, radius and name of the area it belongs to, more oriented to physical stores and restaurants (see sample file)

To get you started please visit the Radium repository on Github.

Summary

So, in conclusion, Radium helps you automate the location targeting configuration and optimization for your Google Ads campaigns, saving you time and minimizing errors of manual adjustments.

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