In the Google newsletter yesterday they announced that they will be automatically including Canada in all new campaigns. If you don’t want to target Canada you must remember to go into your campaign and remove the country from your geo-targeting settings.
We want to call your attention to a change in the campaign set-up process. The default location targeting setting now defaults to the United States and Canada as opposed to just the United States. If you don’t want to include Canada, you’ll need to update that setting before running the campaign, says Google.
I think for people who are geo-targeting a very specific area this probably won’t be a problem since they’ll have to reset their geo-targeting settings anyway. But for people who are targeting the US will need to remember to go back in and check their settings if they can’t service or deliver to Canada. And that I find to be an incredibly annoying aspect of this change.
As most advanced PPC advertisers know you always check your campaign settings before launching your account, or new campaign. However a lot of newbies don’t know to do that and automatically including Canada in their search advertising could hurt their ROI. Who knows how long their account could be running before they finally realize they’re targeting Canada when they shouldn’t be?
Does anyone else out there feel that this is just another way Google is trying to get people’s money, but in the wrong way? All comments are welcome!
