Geotargeting

Geotargeting means telling an ad platform where a person has to be standing before your ad can reach them. You draw a circle on a map around your shop, or you pick the towns you serve, and everyone outside that line stops seeing the ad. The same idea works on your own website, where the delivery time or the branch address changes with the visitor's town.

Most small businesses switch it on for one reason, and that reason is money. You pay for every click, so a click from a city you cannot deliver to is money gone. A bakery that delivers within eight kilometres has no use at all for a click from four hundred kilometres away. That person may even phone, take ten minutes of your day, and then hear that you cannot reach them.

Here is the part people miss. Most platforms also show the ad to people who are merely interested in a place rather than standing in it, so someone abroad reading about your city counts as a match. That setting is usually on by default and it eats a budget quietly, which is why it is worth changing on the first day. Set it so the ad reaches only the people who are really there.

Branches create the harder problem, because one campaign with one budget covering five towns will not split the money evenly. It spends where clicks are cheapest, and that is rarely where you need the sales. So the busy branch starves while the quiet one gets attention it cannot use. Give each branch its own campaign, its own budget and its own phone number, so you can tell which one the calls came from.

Your own systems then have to agree with the map you drew. If the ad promises delivery today in one district, the shop software must know which postcodes qualify and which branch holds the stock. That is why Storek keeps stock per branch. Before Linkysoft starts a digital marketing campaign it asks for the real delivery area in writing, because it is usually smaller than the owner first says.

Location data is not perfect either, since phones guess, office networks lie, and a radius drawn too tightly leaves too few people for the ad to run at all. So read the location report every week for the first month and cut the towns that spend without buying. Linkysoft checks that report first whenever a campaign spends well and sells nothing.