Efficient Frontier Insights

The Importance of Being Honest...

Trust and honesty; it’s the basis of any good relationship, business or otherwise, and implies openness, communication and accountability. Although the engines operate an opaque bidding auction which can bring about uncertainty regarding bid price, trust between you and your agency is crucial.
 
If you are running paid search at scale it is likely you will hand over the running of an account to a third party, which is where things get complicated; but too many advertisers  don’t know what their agency is doing. This is where the advertiser needs to insist on full visibility. It is important to have full access to all your SE accounts, ownership of the SE accounts and data, detailed performance reports and access to the specialist search engine teams. This will help you learn to have confidence in your agency; inevitably there will be periods where you lose track, and that’s where you have to trust your agency to keep you up to date with projects that are being undertaken.

It is also important to understand working with an agency is not a black and white model. Using a hybrid of outsourcing technology and strategic services can work well for advertisers with large and complex campaigns. Ask yourself, who is best to control tasks such as bid management, measurement, inventory, forecasting, ad copy, landing pages etc; can you realistically do it all yourself? Use pixel tracking to measure conversions, and use data feeds to send us information about rejections and cancellations - are you able to deliver this information to an agency, and are they able to take it? Clear communication and measurement is the key to a transparent relationship.

At Efficient Frontier we provide different levels of service to ensure that each client gets the correct level of support, from Full Service through to Technology Only - in fact our Technology Only clients have the same dashboard privileges that we do, meaning that they can steer our technology themselves (with guidance).

By following these guidelines, we aim to build on the trust that each client puts in us to run and optimise their search marketing campaigns.

Jimmy Felstead
UK Account Manager

Should you bid on Brand Terms?

Some advertisers believe that bidding on their own brand terms is foolish and translates to money down the drain. The rationale being that the user has decided to convert with the brand he searched for and it would make more sense if he did it by clicking on the natural listings. Brand terms almost always appear at the top of the natural listings. So why waste valuable budget on PPC?

But how much budget are you actually saving by cutting out brand terms? And what about customer fickleness?

By not bidding on your brand, you have a whole new set of issues to deal with :

1.    Affiliates: Affiliates love bidding on brand terms as this mean lots of commission for almost no hard work. And this means that the advertiser ends up paying a lot more for his brand than he would, by simply bidding on it. Affiliates can be difficult to control and often stealthy. They might bid out of office hours and geo target very cleverly not to get caught out. These are just some of the known tactics. Bidding on your brand can mitigate the effects  of "direct-to-site" affiliates.

2.    Google’s broad match algorithm: Bidding on your brand terms reduces the possibility of the more expensive generic ad appearing for brand + generic searches as a result of Google’s broad match algorithm.

3.    Time Sensitive Promotions: Paid search ads will allow you to tailor your messaging which you cannot do so easily on SEO.  Use SEO for broad company information and messages that will survive for a prolonged period  and use paid search ads for opportunities to promote key tactical campaign offers including time sensitive information, pricing and calls to action.

4.    Competitors: Competitors will not miss out an opportunity to bid on your brand and steal your traffic! Although you might have a customer searching for your brand, a hard-to-resist offer in a competitor’s ad can change the customer’s mind at the last minute. Make sure you protect your brand by bidding on it.

5.    PR: Due to the nature of social media, the possibility of negative stories and reviews rising up through natural search is very high. Bidding on your brand has the added bonus of pushing these stories down the page and hopefully below the fold.

6.    Universal Search: The increasing instance of universal search, such as map results or images, is also pushing natural search listings down the page. To ensure your brand is still visible it is important to bid on your brand.

7.    Last but not least: CTR should be so good on your own brand that what you pay should be minimal.

To conclude, an advertiser should consider very carefully whether they have the time and the resources to monitor their brand 24/7 before they stop bidding on their brand terms. There is also significant research that using PPC and SEO together can actually increase CTR, conversion rate and total revenues.

Rekha Patil, UK Account Manager  

Efficient Frontier Search Theatre - AdTech London

Ad:Tech London 2009 is next week and this year we will be hosting our very own Search Theatre, nearby to the Google University.

Efficient Frontier will run seminars covering Search Engine Marketing on both days of the show and we invite you to join us alongside our special guests to hear about best practices, trends and future advancements. Plan your day below. 

We do hope you can join us!
Merinda Peppard, European Marketing Manager

Efficient Frontier Search Theatre
22nd September Timetable

10:30 – 11:05
What’s around the Corner? Trends in Search Engine Marketing
Merinda Peppard, European Marketing Manager, Efficient Frontier
Siddharth Shah, Director of Business Analytics, Efficient Frontier

As the largest search engine marketing firm, Efficient Frontier has access to tremendous amounts of search engine data. Join them for an overview of the most recent quarterly search engine performance report. Hear how the recession has affected consumer search trends and what we are likely to see in the future. 

11:50 – 12:25
Bada Bing: The new Microsoft with Marks & Spencer
Craig Brown, Search Media Analyst, Microsoft Advertising
Charlotte Rogers, Account Director, Efficient Frontier

Master search marketing with the experts. Join Microsoft and Efficient Frontier as they present a best practice guide to optimising Microsoft (Bing). Walk through a Marks & Spencer case study with Efficient Frontier and hear how best to use Microsoft’s functionality. Find out if Bing is right for your business. 

13:10 – 13:45
The Road Ahead: The Future of Biddable Media
Jonathan Beeston, Client Services Director, Efficient Frontier

Search engines are rapidly becoming a “one-stop platform” where marketers can bid on, manage and track all of their advertising campaigns – including paid search, display and video ads. What are these Ad Exchanges and what does advertising in a biddable marketplace mean for advertisers?

13:50 – 14:25
Quality Score and best practices with Google
Siddharth Shah, Director of Business Analytics, Efficient Frontier

Quality Score is incredibly important but is also difficult to handle. Join Efficient Frontier as they present a best practice guide to optimising your Google search campaigns. Also Learn how you can optimise each component of the Quality Score and ensure the ad reflects user intent. 

14:30 – 15:05
Google Content – are you missing a trick?
Phil Dance, Client Development Manager, Efficient Frontier

Users now have more control over which sites they target on Google’s contextual advertising product, Google Content. Gain insights into the inner workings of Google Content and learn how to get the best out of the Adsense platform. Find out why Efficient Frontier advertisers have increased spend on Content by 71% year-on-year.

15:50 – 16:25
In-house or Agency? A frank guide to your SEM options
Toby McAra, Manager, Efficient Frontier

Feeling the budget squeeze and thinking of going inhouse? Efficient Frontier takes a look at the benefits of taking your search marketing in-house and using a specialist agency. We dissect the UK agency and technology landscape and simplify the different services on offer. When is implementing fancy technology simply a waste of money? 

16:30 – 17:05
The Science of Integration: SEO & PPC
Jane Copland, Senior SEO Consultant, Ayima Search Marketing
Jonathan Beeston, Client Services Director, Efficient Frontier

During this session, Efficient Frontier team up with search engine optimisation experts Ayima Search Marketing to highlight the practical, actionable techniques that will make an immediate difference to your sites' placement in organic search results and how to connect your dynamic PPC activity to receive optimal return on your search investment. 

View the timetable for day two here: 23rd September Timetable

Follow the data...not the position

When we take onboard new clients, we find that some clients have a predetermined idea on which position on the Search Engine is the best. Some advertisers believe position 1-3 on Google is a must. Putting aside any branding or defensive PR reason for being placed at number one, one of the first things we try to educate new clients is to let the data dictate your Search Engine Results Page (SERP) position.  The following case study shows the importance of letting the data work its magic and give you a better ROI.
 
Recently, a German travel client used more than 3900 keyword constraints in order to influence its overall performance. A keyword constraint is the maximum/minimum CPC or maximum/minimum position rule for each individual keywords.  Soon, 90% of the daily budget was used to fulfill these constraint targets and only 10% of the budget was actually used to optimize keywords and increase real performance.
 

By taking away the majority of constraints, the complete daily budget was available to have the keyword market develop and to use the data generated from Efficient Frontier's portfolio optimization technology. Monitoring the performance very intensely, the following development was encountered.

When looking at Efficient Frontier's simulations this step became even more obvious. When the constraints were taken away, uplifts can be expected immediately. In this case, we saw an ROI increase of 96% (day to day) and 45% (week to week) just by taking away keyword limitations and letting the invisible hand of the optimizer take over. Since then, the free market environment has allowed the performance to improve continuously.

So if ROI is your key objective,  resist the need to seek the top SERPs positions and liberate your keywords from their constraints to improve performance and ROI.

Julian Stank
SMS Hamburg Germany

Treemaps: SEM Campaign Visualization Tool

In a presentation at SMX Advanced earlier this month, Sid Shah, PhD, Sr. Business Analyst at Efficient Frontier, introduced two useful tools for visualizing campaign performance. Histograms were shown to be useful for setting performance goals for head keywords versus tail keywords. Treemaps were the second visualization tool Sid presented and will be explained here.

Treemaps were developed in the early 1990's by professor Ben Shneiderman at the University of Maryland. He sought a way to visualize directory tree structures on his hard drive in order to find large files that could be deleted or identify which users consumed the largest amount of disk space. Eventually treemaps were developed into a usable software product and the version we use at Efficient Frontier is available as an Excel add-in from Microsoft Research.

Good examples of treemaps in action are SmartMoney's Map of the Market and this news map. Looking at the Map of the Market is a quick way to see how certain sectors have performed, and which stocks in those sectors are performing well or poorly. Each rectangle represents a company, and the size of the rectangle represents the company's market cap, while the color shows price performance. Mousing over the rectangles shows the name and data for the individual stocks, and clicking allows you to drill down further on each sector and view sub-sector performance.

Similarly, treemaps can be applied to your search campaign. In the fictitious example used here, the smallest rectangles represent individual keywords, and the size of the rectangles indicates spend. The keywords are grouped by campaign, and finally by search engine. The color indicates ROI, with red representing poor ROI, and purple representing positive ROI. The shade of the color indicates how negative or positive the ROI is, with white representing average ROI. You could also use revenue, CPA, impressions, CTR, CPC, or any other metric to size or color your rectangles.

In the fictitious example above, we can see that Google accounted for about 60% of spend, with the "gift baskets" and "flowers" campaigns about equal in spend. Since this retailer, called Flower Express, does not have a very strong brand, its brand terms account for a small portion of spend. The keywords "flower delivery" and "flower arrangements" are among the best performing on Google, while it appears "florist shop" and "floral shop" performed poorly on both Google and Yahoo. This could indicate that those searchers are seeking local shops rather than an online shop, and investment in those terms should be reduced. Non product specific terms "gifts for men" and gifts for women" did not perform well, and perhaps spend could be shifted to high ROI terms like "plant arrangements." Like SmartMoney's Map of the Market, search engine or campaign rectangles can be clicked on to drill down, which can be helpful when examining data sets larger than the one shown.

For those of you who spend the day poring through spreadsheets containing rows of numbers in an effort to measure and improve campaign performance, treemaps can be a refreshing way to visualize data. They can help you spot opportunities as well as eliminate poor performers. They can also help you determine the level of risk in your campaign by showing just how dominant a head term might be. At Efficient Frontier, treemaps provide our business analysts and account managers insights about our accounts to help grow them for the future, and further improve the high campaign performance provided by our bid management technology.

 

Increase returns by tracking and optimizing the right web metrics

Metrics are important, both in online and traditional marketing but it's the trackability which makes online marketing so exciting. What's even more exciting is that the technological advancement in online marketing has enabled maximization of multiple success metrics simultaneously.

Track right metrics

Tracking provides visibility on business relevant metrics like return on investment (ROI), cost per order (CPO), return on ad spend (ROAS) and user lifetime value (LTV). You should try to track as many metrics as possible, even if they are not needed at the time the campaign is set up. It's frustrating not to have the data you need at a later time.

Conversion data on various steps in the process can provide useful insights on visitor bounce rates, page views, links clicked and actions taken. Having this information can help understand how users navigate through the site and the pages where users drop off.

Optimize to success metrics

If the conversion is a single step process, it's easy to choose the optimization metric. However, often the conversion cycle involves multiple steps. Marketers are faced with the challenge of selecting the best optimization metric in such situations.

For example, for an online dating advertiser it could be confusing whether the optimization metric should be registrations or subscriptions. By trying to maximize only subscriptions, the advertiser runs the risk of ignoring registrations which could potentially bring subscriptions. On the other hand, by trying to maximize only registrations, the advertiser might end up with too many registrations which may never turn into subscriptions.

These metrics are interdependent and for optimization purposes one can not be chosen over the other. This is when multi-metric or "blended" optimization is necessary.

Blended optimization

At Efficient Frontier we use a blended optimization approach which allows our clients to optimize their ad campaigns concurrently to multiple business metrics. For example, the marketing objective for one of our banking clients is to maximize new customer sign ups. The sales process involves three steps: application form completion, approval and final sign up. The campaigns or keywords driving final sign ups are more valuable than the ones driving approvals and form completions. With Efficient Frontier's tracking technology, the client is able to track entire sales funnel and the user drop off at each stage in the funnel.

Efficient Frontier's optimization technology allows our clients to assign different weights to different stages in the sales funnel based on the value of each stage. Using this technology, the banking client is able to maximize customer sign ups while maintaining the constant inflow of the leads or application form completions.

Web metrics can tell the advertisers exactly where the marketing budget is being spent and what they are getting out of every marketing dollar. If implemented, tracked and optimized right, these strategies can certainly help increase the return on investment.

Search Engine Results Page - Wealth of Information

Search engine marketplaces provide tremendous opportunities for marketers to learn and understand competitive activity, better plan and execute ad campaigns and constantly monitor their standing in the market. You can achieve these objectives by quickly examining the search engine results page (SERP) for your top keywords and following the tips below.

1. Ad Campaign Planning

Before you launch your ad campaigns, you should look at the SERP for the top keywords and try to answer these questions:

How relevant are your keywords to the product? One word can sometimes represent multiple products. For example the word "portfolio management" may refer to investment management, IT portfolio management or project management. Users searching for "portfolio management" could be looking for any of the above.

A quick review of the Yahoo! SERP for "portfolio management" clearly shows that investment portfolio management dominates the page.

The search engines' algorithms display results based on what most searchers are looking for when using that keyword. If your product doesn't belong to the dominant results for certain keywords, it's a good idea to keep a low profile on such keywords to avoid getting irrelevant clicks. Clearly stating the product offering in the ad copy would further help you avoid irrelevant clicks.

Are you competing with unrelated products for placement? Different products can afford different keyword CPCs, and if you are competing with a completely unrelated product for placement, you might end up paying a higher CPC. Inspection of the SERP for your top terms can help you identify and deal with such a situation.

For example, assuming that based on product price, marketing budget and other factors, an investment portfolio management vendor is able to pay a CPC of $5 for the keyword "portfolio management." An IT portfolio management vendor may only be able to afford a CPC of $2 to meet ROI targets. In order to compete with investment portfolio management, the IT portfolio management vendor will need to bid higher and pay a CPC that might not be within budget.

2. Ad Campaign Evaluation

Search engine marketing makes it easy for marketers to evaluate their competitive standing. You should exploit this opportunity to constantly ensure that your ad copies are unique and they differentiate your offering from those of sponsored and non-sponsored links.

Competitive offers vs your offer. Many advertisers are always on their toes writing the most effective ad copies which highlight their best offers. You can easily understand their messaging strategy and approach through the SERP.

Natural search results vs your offer. You are not just competing with other sponsored links but also the natural search results. Advanced SEO enables search marketers to highlight their special offers even in the natural search results. Furthermore, Yahoo! Search Marketing's paid inclusion product Search Submit lets advertisers control the messaging in the natural search results by allowing them to create titles and descriptions that are displayed as algorithmic search result listings. Thus, advertisers are able to highlight their offer even in the natural search results.

Conduct searches using your top terms and ensure that your ad copies and offers stand out from your competitors.

3. Ad Campaign Monitoring

SERPs can help you monitor ad campaigns by providing insights on the infringing actions of your competitors, affiliates and even other business units in your own organization.

Competitors using your trademark keywords. Yahoo! Search Marketing and Microsoft adCenter do not allow this and have prevention measures in place but you should also consider it your responsibility to ensure that others are not using your trademark in their keywords and ad copies. Google's trademark policy is more lenient but if you find out that your trademark is being misused, you should file a complaint.

Affiliates bidding on your top keywords. Your own affiliates bidding on your brand and top keywords can cause unnecessary CPC inflation if you get into bidding wars with them.

Other business units bidding on your terms. A business unit belonging to a large enterprise sometimes can inadvertently bid on terms representing another business product. This can cause a bidding war within the same organization and unnecessarily increase keyword CPC. Collaborative bidding techniques, as used by some clients of Efficient Frontier, can help optimize spend in these situations.

Throughout the ad campaign life cycle, the SERP can provide valuable insights. By proactively understanding the marketplace and the competition you can avoid unexpected post-launch surprises. You should stay updated with your competitors' strategies and actions on an ongoing basis, and take measures if your trademark and brand are being misused.

Finally, if you are short on ideas, you can look at competitor ad copies and offers on the SERP and use the information to create your own campaigns. As they say, "imitation is the sincerest form of flattery."

SEM Tools: Risks, Limitations & Best Practices - Part III: Demographic Targeting

In the previous two posts in this series, I discussed key elements to pay attention to in geo targeting and content targeting. In the final post in the series, I will discuss the risks, limitations and best practices in using demographic targeting.

Part III: Demographic Targeting

Demographic targeting is a relatively new tool currently offered by MSN AdCenter and Google Adwords (for limited site targeted content campaigns). Through demographic targeting you can target your audience based on gender, age, ethnicity, family income and even whether they have children at home or not. This would be one of the greatest tools for search engine marketing if completely accurate, since you will be able to show your ads to the preferred demographic. However, there is still room for improvement.

1. Inaccurate User Information

Search engines base demographic targeting on the information users enter at the time of signing up for any of their products. MSN AdCenter, for example gets this information from MSN Hotmail and Microsoft Windows signups. It’s a common knowledge that people give inaccurate information during signups and there is no shortage of fake Hotmail and Gmail profiles on the internet. Search engines base their trends on this information which is perhaps not entirely accurate.

For example, a 50 year old man in Canada can easily create a user profile of a 27 year old woman in San Diego, California. Thus a cosmetics ad intended for women in their 20s would not reach its intended audience in this case.

2. Again, know your business

Just like , demographic targeting would be applicable only for certain businesses and not for others. If your product is targeted towards a particular demographic, it may make sense to use this tool.

When I looked at the demographic report for the keywords "evening gown" and "tuxedo" from MSN AdCenter’s new MS Excel Add-in "Ad Intelligence", I could see very clear gender-based search trends. If you are a business which aims to sell evening gowns and tuxedos, you should keep two sets of keywords, one targeted towards men and the other towards women. 

Similarly, if you look at the demographics for the keyword "baby clothes," the majority of searches are from women between the ages of 18 and 50. 

On the other hand, if you look for demographic trending of electronics related keywords like "hdtv" and "digital camera," the search volume doesn't skew strongly towards one gender or age group. In this case demographic targeting would limit your reach more than necessary and is not recommended.   

All said, you should have enough data and proof to determine which demographic group is more likely to buy your product before you use this feature.

Unlike geo and content targeting, demographic targeting is relatively new. I am still not completely confident of its accuracy as many web users likely enter incorrect information. I am positive though, that the tool will become more robust in future. If you decide on using this tool, I would strongly recommend conducting research on demographic trends in your business from both internal and external sources.

SEM Tools: Risks, Limitations & Best Practices – Part II: Content Targeting

In the second post of the series, I will focus on another popular search engine marketing tool: content targeting. This post mainly covers various setting options in content targeting to be aware of and ways to avoid common mistakes.

Part II: Content Targeting

Content targeting implies the use of the SEM platform to place bids and advertise on websites which are part of the search engine’s content network. There are few points to keep in mind while using content targeting for SEM campaigns.

1. Do not turn on search and content for the same campaigns

Search engines provide the option to have the same campaign targeted to both, the search and the content network. Creating a single search+content targeted campaign seems like an easy choice, but in order to be more effective, it is better to create two separate campaigns, one search targeted and the other content targeted.

Content advertising is quite different from search advertising. Through content targeting your ads show up when someone is browsing a web page/website which contains keywords related to your campaign. In search advertising your ads only show up when a user enters a keyword in the search box that you have placed a bid on. The intent of the searcher is much stronger than the intent of the user browsing a website, where they may already be viewing the content they were searching for. Thus, content advertising has much lower click through rates and lower CPCs, but can give your campaign broader exposure outside of search.

In order to show ads relevant to a web page, the search engine algorithm needs to match the keyword with web page content. Since it is not possible to find relevant web pages simply by looking at one keyword, the search engines look at all the keywords in an ad group and identify the dominant theme represented by that ad group. Once they have identified the theme, they find relevant web pages and place ads on them. In search advertising the algorithm just looks at the keyword to show the ads.

Therefore, it’s a good practice to have separate campaigns targeted only to the content network. Within these content campaigns group similar keywords together in ad groups so that each ad group has its own theme.

2. Be careful what you bid

As mentioned above, content CPCs are much lower than search CPCs, because of less competition and lower conversion rates. There is no reason you should bid same amount for search and content placements, especially when search engines provide options for separate bidding. As recommended earlier, always try to have separate campaigns for search and content but in case you have the same campaigns targeted to both the search and the content network, you should separate bids for search and content clicks. For example, to separate bids in Google AdWords you can check the box "Content bids" during campaign set up.

3. Understand Billing Options

You should understand and if required, use the various billing options available for content targeting. For example, Google currently offers several billing methods such as CPC (Cost per click), CPM (Cost per 1000 impressions) and PPA (Pay per action).

In CPM you pay for 1000 impressions whether or not anyone clicks on your ad. CPM is applicable to the advertisers who want to reach customers early in the advertising cycle, with ads designed to increase awareness but not necessarily generate clicks or traffic.

In PPA, you don’t pay for the clicks but pay only when certain action (for example, subscription or lead capture) is completed by the users on your website. You can set this action and the price you are willing to pay for it. PPA billing is useful when click-to-conversion rate is extremely poor and when the advertisers know exactly how much each conversion is worth to be able to set its value.

In conclusion, for a campaign to be effective on content network ensure that similar keywords are grouped together (as discussed in my post on campaign organization) for the search engines to identify the dominant theme, campaigns are set up for the most efficient bidding and you are using the billing method most appropriate for your business.

 

SEM Tools: Risks, Limitations & Best Practices – Part I: Geo Targeting

Should you use all the search engine marketing tools currently being offered by the search engines? Maybe yes, maybe no. If you do use them it is very important that you understand them correctly and use them in the most effective manner. As the competition among search engines increases and advertisers have more options, search engines have to offer more and more SEM tools to attract and retain advertisers. These tools are definitely useful and tempting, but you must understand their limitations and applicability to your business before using them for your campaigns.

This 3 part series will explore risks, limitations and best practices in using some of the currently popular tools: geo targeting, content targeting and demographic targeting.

Part I: Geographical Targeting 

Through geographical or "geo targeting", you can target your advertising to any US or international region(s). Your ad will be shown only in the selected regions. However, before using this tool for your SEM campaigns you must understand:

1. Your Business type

Geo targeting is useful for businesses whose offering or product prices vary by location, such as online home listings, online dating and web-based job listings. In all these cases there is strong likelihood of the searcher having a location preference.

It is also useful for small businesses who can only serve a local market. Obviously, the neighborhood pizza place in San Jose, CA would not want to show ads in New York and pay for the non-converting clicks.

Geo targeting is most likely not useful for businesses like online retail and enterprise software, since the product offering and prices do not usually vary from one location to the other. You can avoid spending resources in setting up geo targeting if it does not make sense for your business.

2. Bidding limitations

Without careful planning, you will end up placing the same bid for keywords across different locations. This is dangerous and ineffective because keyword CPCs vary across locations based on what competitors are bidding for the keyword in that location. You should create separate campaigns for each geographical region you are targeting, in order to avoid placing the same bid for a keyword across multiple locations.

In the Google AdWords example shown, the campaign “Online Dating” is targeted to Australia, Germany, United States etc. The problem with this structure is that the keywords in this campaign will have the same bid across multiple countries. 

 

 

If there is a keyword “singles dating” in this campaign and if we bid $5 for it based on its performance in the US, we will end up placing the same $5 bid in Germany, in Australia and in China. While its performance might justify the bid in United States, $5 might be very high for China and very low for the Germany. With this bid you might end up at the top position in China, which may not be the most optimal position there. On the contrary, in Germany you might lose out on good traffic because of the low bid and hence low position. 

3. Technical limitations

Geo targeting works by the search engine’s ability to capture a user's IP address or other identifying information, check that information against a database that suggests the likely geographic location of that user, and then serve up targeted ads based on this geographical location. The database is not 100% accurate and there could be IP addresses which are missing from this database. No geo targeted ads are served to the users with missing IP addresses.

Secondly, company firewalls and large internet service providers (which use several IP addresses) tend to skew geographical location. This could result in ads to show up at unintended locations. Geo targeting therefore, is not 100% accurate and sufficient to saturate a regional market with search engine advertising.

To conclude, before you set up any kind of regional or international geo targeting for your campaigns, it is important to ensure that the targeting applies to your business and it is set up for the most effective bidding. In addition, you must understand that you might lose out some traffic volume because of the technical limitations.