If you’re running a geo-specific AdWords campaign you may have wondered why you sometimes receive, and thus pay, for clicks outside of the area you are targeting.
For example, you may be running a campaign for a local business in downtown Chicago. And to make sure that your ads only reach local searchers, you’ve indicated exactly which ZIP codes you want associated with your ads. However, when you sift through the analytics, you see that some of the users that are clicking on your ads are from outside the pre-determined ZIP’s. They might be coming from New York or San Diego or a nearby town in Illinois.
The reason for this is query parsing. Google explains query parsing well in their AdWords Help forum, but we’ll attempt to explain it here as well. The best way to do so is by demonstrating what it does.
If you are bidding on “chicago grocery stores,” someone
in Oklahoma could see your ad, even if you targeted the campaign toward
people living in Chicago. This is query parsing. Google looks at this searcher in Oklahoma as if they were in Chicago because of their intention with the search.
Query parsing is part of Google AdWord’s algorithm for matching searches with relevant ads and you cannot control it. It makes sense, as someone in a different city could certainly be looking for products or services in Chicago for any number of reasons.
