You can choose any particular combination of geographical locations to target with your Google ad campaign, to focus on countries, regions, territories, cities and specific custom areas. For instance, if you wish to access English-speaking users in certain areas, you might target key regions within the US and perhaps a few large English-speaking European cities. If you run a food chain in New York, obviously you should target ads to that area, to increase their effectiveness.

Following are some of the aspects to be kept in mind when it comes to targeting your ads to specific countries or cities:

• An interactive map targeting tool makes specifying your location targeting an easy task. You may search for countries, regions and cities, or pick a pre-set bunch of locations; select a point on the map to mark a radius for your ads; and exclude areas not required even within your selected locations. You can change the location settings at any given time.
• When a user enters a keyword relevant to your site on Google, the AdWords brings into play a combination of factors to decide whether or not to show your ad. For this, the Google domain being employed (.fr, .kr, .de etc.) is considered. So if a user is visiting www.google.fr (the domain for France), ads targeted to that country will be shown, regardless of that user’s present location! The actual search term that the user submits on the search engine is analyzed for determining when to display ads targeted to a region or city.
• If one happens to enter a query, which contains a fairly recognizable city or region, appropriate regional or custom-targeted ads may well be shown. For instance, if one is searching for ‘London plumbers,’ the system will show relevant ads specifically targeted to that city. If and when possible, the users’ general or specific physical location is determined based on their computer’s IP address.
• An Internet Protocol (IP) address, as we are aware of, denotes a unique number that is assigned by Internet ISPs to each machine connected to the Web. What regional/ custom targeted ads really means is that if one looks for ‘plumbers’ from a London area IP address, ads targeted to that area may be displayed, though ‘London’ wasn’t mentioned in the search query.
• Additionally, language setting of a user will decide which ads he or she gets to see. The Google homepage ‘Preferences’ link allows users to select the language in which they wish to search. When they set the language preference, the search engine will only display ads, which are targeted to the selected language.
• For instance, users who choose French as their language preference will get to see ads targeted to French speakers. If the user has not specified any language preference, the Google domain (such as Google.fr) will determine the default language preference (obviously, in this case, French).