This is a very common question, and one that’s often addressed in the AdWords Seminar. The answer to the question resolves around how you use your reporting statistics for further optimization.

If you run a campaign targeted to the UK, Canada, US, and Australia (a very common thing to see), and after a month you have these stats:

• CTR: 5%
• Conversion rate: 5%
• CPC: $2

What do you do next? Where are your ads doing well?

If you had this data:

Suddenly, you can make much better decisions.

• The UK converts well, and is the cheapest click, but has a much lower CTR – work on raising that CTR.
• The US CPC is way too high compared to the others and the conversion rate, lower the CPC.
• Do the math on Australia, with a high CPC, but a nice conversion rate, it might be an OK campaign.

The more granular you can view the data, the better decisions you can make.

And I didn’t even mention the most obvious question, how do you spell ‘color’ or ‘colour’ in your ad copy? Every area has a different belief system and different ways they react to words. You can’t test well for different geographies if you don’t have the data to work with.

There are some reasons to start bundling countries; however, a good general rule of thumb: target just one country per campaign.

Google has long made the statement that when examining CTRs for calculating quality score, only the CTR on Google.com was used (which was normalized by position).

Now that quality score is being factored in real time, it makes sense to change that rule slightly.

The CTR used in determining the quality score for search will be your CTR on that specific site. Therefore, if your ad will be shown on Google.com, as with the past, your CTR on Google.com will be used.

If your ad is being displayed on Aol.com; then your CTR on Aol.com will be used in calculating your quality score.

Overall, a pretty minor change – but one that’s worth nothing how some of the ‘makes sense’ factors on quality score will now be possible with the real time calculation.

Google has updated their information on Quality Score to now include geographic information. This has long been a part of the ‘other relevancy factors’; so it shouldn’t be that big of a surprise.

At present, it’s only used in calculating the quality score for search.

Essentially, Google is looking to see how your account performs in different geographies. At present, this factor is listed to be used at the account level. Hopefully, it will eventually be moved to the campaign level, which is where you can actually specify different geographies.

This should help small businesses who are targeting very locally.

It should also help those who are tightly focusing their keywords and ad copy around specific geographies. You should use one campaign per country at a minimum (another post coming on that soon).

I’ve updated the Quality Score Factors Chart to also include the new geographic information.