A quick warning. Google has included Canada as part of the general geo-targeted settings in Google Adwords. Previously only the United States was targeted by default. Though most advanced users may notice this change, it is something easy to miss. New users in Google Adwords may also easily look over this small update or figure it is common practice to target both regions.

Many may respond to my statement above by saying that no one would make such a simple mistake. Believe me, many will. You will be surprised. I can promise you Google will profit quite a bit off of this little change. Even if only 1 out of 1000 people overlook this change, in a pool of 100,000 advertisers, a million advertisers, that is a good chunk of change.

As LeadQual promotes international clients including in Canada, this comes to us as a disconcerting news as it may artificially raise competition in Canada.

Yahoo has always targeted both US and Canada by default.

Paul Lee
Director of Online Marketing
LeadQual - SEM

Tags: google, Google Adwords, Search Engine Marketing, SEM

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 6th, 2008 at 6:38 pm and is filed under Search Engine Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.