I have written about the importance of running your Adwords Geographic reports before, but in the meantime checking your geographic performance has become much easier, so let’s look at this again.

Nowadays, to view your campaign performance (impression, clicks, conversions) by country, you can just go to the Dimensions tab in your Adwords online interface and select GeoGraphic from the View list on the top left. Make sure to select a date range long enough to have substantial data (say the past 3 months).

What’s up with movie fans in Italy?

I was looking at this report today for my Movie Collector campaign and I found that when sorting the report by Impressions, Italy was the 4th country in the list. This is strange, but doesn’t have to be a problem if the conversion numbers are similar. However, when sorting by Conversions (trial sign ups in my case), I found that Italy was at position 10. The conversion rate on those italian impressions was way lower than average. Looking at actual sales stats, the results were even worse: Italy was nowhere to be found in the top 20 countries.

It turns out that in my case, for this particular campaign, it doesn’t make sense to spend money advertising to Italy. So I removed Italy from the Country list in my Movie Collector campaign settings. Making my Adwords account a tiny bit more profitable again.

BTW: in my previous blog post about this topic I reported having removed Greece from my campaign settings. See the trend here? 🙂

Should you remove Italy from your campaigns too?

So do I have something against Italy? No of course not, on the contrary. I love Italy, italian people, italians cars, etc… And I love selling software to Italy and will continue to do so. But my stats just tell me that for my business, for this particular product, it does not make sense to spend my advertising money on Italy.

Am I suggesting you should remove Italy from your campaigns too? No, definitely not. My recommendation is just to take a look at your Adwords account, at the GeoGraphic reports for your campaigns and find out for yourself which countries you should be advertising to and which ones you should remove from your your campaign settings. As always: your mileage may vary.

The other solution

Of course, there’s a different action you could take after finding that ad impressions in a particular country don’t convert well. You could of course tweak your ads, tune your landing page, maybe even improve your product and try to increase your conversion rate there. And you should.
But still, while you’re doing all that, until your conversion rate has improved, I would still recommend lowering your ad spend in that country.

For instance, I am now investigating why Movie Collector doesn’t sell well in Italy. Maybe the Italian translation sucks, maybe I am missing some important Italian payment methods, maybe it’s just that the coverage of italian movies in our online movie database isn’t too great. All things that can be fixed., but that will take time. In the meantime, google.it isn’t getting my money.