SEO Blueprints

I started a post today in the Digital Point forums about a problem I had regarding sending Adwords traffic to Azoogle Ads. Here is my original post:

Azoogle Problem With International Traffic
I am having a problem with the conversions from Adwords to Azoogle because of “international traffic.”

What I did:
1. Set up a campaign in Adwords just for Azoogle and made the United States the ONLY country in my target audience.
2. Sent traffic to a US Only Azoogle program (there aren’t many for international traffic).

The problem:
Azoogle redirects my traffic to an international landing page a high % of the time (today it was 144 / 165 clicks!!) where the landing page is something totally unrelated to my traffic and doesn’t convert.

Source of the problem
1. Adwords is sending international traffic through a US only campaign
OR 2. Azoogle is counting US traffic international and redirecting it to a place where I don’t make any money.

My Action
1. I called Azooogle. My rep said they would “look into it” and get back to me.
2. I called Adwords. They said they don’t track the IP addresses and need data to fix the problem.

Interesting point: The Adwords rep said that if I targeted the ads towards a US market, international traffic would still go through my campaign even if someone searched from another country. In my case, I didn’t say “American” or “United States” in my ads so he said that probably wasn’t the case.

My Question for Readers
Has anyone else had this problem? What did you do? What should I do? Any insight?

The responses were quick and from both a big user and promoter of Azoogle Ads, Shoemoney, and Alex, the co-founder of AzoogleAds. Basically the suggestions were to track my traffic any way possible and to double-check everything. Sound advice, but the mystery was still out there as to why did nearly all of my traffic on a campaign for United States only traffic turned up as international.

I lost the money I had spent (thankfully I had a low daily spending limit and that probably saved me from losing a lot more), but did learn a few things.

1. From Adwords Phone Support: Putting only ‘United States’ in your Campaign Settings doesn’t necessarily mean I only get US traffic, I could get traffic from people searching for US products or services. The example I was given was if someone in Italy typed “american t-shirts” they would fulfill the requirement of searching in the “United States market”.

2. Email from Adwords support:

Thank you for your email. I understand you are concerned that your campaign received clicks from users located outside of your target country. Although you have targeted your campaign to the United States, it is still possible for users located in other countries to see your ads. The most likely reason is that a user searches on the Google domain of your targeted country, which in this case is Google.com.

In our experience, users who search on a country-specific Google domain are looking for content targeted to that country. We showed your ads to these users to help ensure that you receive as much relevant traffic as possible. As a result, we are unable to offer you a credit for these clicks.

He then went on to explain a way to actually get geotargeted traffic. He said to change the location settings from Countries and territories to Regions and cities and choose the appropriate regions within a country. So basically instead of choosing ‘United States’ as a country, switch to regions and cities and choose each of the fifty States. This seemed ludicrous to me, and I doubt very much most people do this, but I did it today. Let’s see what happens.

Filed under: Azoogle, Affiliate Marketing, PPC, Adwords