Local online advertising

LOCAL ADVERTISEMENTS past and present

Local or regional advertising has been done for a long time. Before the Internet conquered the world, people mainly used flyers or the widely known advertising magazines. Even today, these methods are still very popular, despite the rather important disadvantages that exist: with flyers, you pay high costs for the design, printing and the people who hand out the flyers. The cost of advertising in a commercial magazine is becoming increasingly prohibitive. And yet those expensive flyers or advertising sheets are often not even looked at. Many people are getting so fed up with them that special letterbox stickers have even been designed for them.

However, the biggest disadvantage of these traditional “offline” methods is that you cannot measure the conversion rate or the ROI of your campaigns. Thus, you are paying a lot of money every year without knowing if it is actually worth it.

This is completely different in online marketing, because on the Internet everything is tracked. Google Ads and social media networks like LinkedIn and Facebook both have handy analytics and insights tools, where an advertiser can almost drown in statistics. For a layman it might be a bit overwhelming, but for an experienced advertiser it is an inexhaustible source of useful data. That’s why online ads have a big advantage, because measuring = knowing, that also applies to local online advertising.

It is therefore not surprising that more and more local traders are also seeing the benefits of online advertising, for example in promoting an open day or to increase awareness in their own town/city.

Advertise locally online with GOOGLE ADS

In such locally targeted ads, it is also best to use the name of the region in which you are advertising. This way, surfers will immediately have a landmark in your ads.

So use headers like:
Your plumber in Antwerp
SEO specialist Zurenborg
The locksmith for Bruges

It is also best to give some thought to the keywords you use. It will be much more efficient to combine your products or services with the regions where you offer them. A small example: if you want to advertise locally online for an Italian restaurant in Wevelgem, advertise on “italian restaurant wevelgem”, instead of just on “italian restaurant”.

By using more specific keywords, your quality score will be higher and your average cost per click lower, while still achieving a nice position in Google.

Google Ads location targeting has made serious progress in recent years. Nowadays it is possible to be very broad or very targeted: on the one hand you can be very broad and select all of Europe, for example, while on the other hand you can be very narrow by selecting only different districts of Antwerp, for example.

It is also possible to advertise in a radius around a certain point. This can even be an address or a street, but the minimum radius is 1 km.

Are there regions in which you absolutely do not want to advertise? Then it is important to exclude them. In the image below for example, all neighbouring countries of Belgium are excluded (the red areas). This way of targeting should certainly not be forgotten; you don’t want to waste money on visitors from countries that are of no use to you.

Advertise locally online with FACEBOOK

Local advertising with Facebook actually works in much the same way as with Google Ads. Facebook’s accuracy has also been fiercely improved recently. Previously, one always had to work with a radius of at least 10km, but this has since changed to a minimum radius of 1km.

This location targeting is only one part of the Target Groups with which you advertise on Facebook. You refine such a target group based on demographics, interests, topics and of course location. So, with Facebook you don’t work with keywords, but with a lot of settings to refine yourself who gets to see your ads.
This gives you the opportunity to define your target groups and campaign strategy very precisely: ideal for local online ads!

MEASURING = KNOWING

The biggest advantage of local online advertising is of course the data that is collected. Measuring = knowing: by studying the performance of campaigns we can really optimize them. That way we can see what works and what doesn’t, which ad text converts best, which places don’t pay off, which days or hours are the most clicked, etc.