Stop Wasting PPC $$$ - US Zipcode Data is Your Best Friend

Jaz

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This tip works best on local US Google Ad campaigns, but it will work great still on any local or national USA ad campaign as well, it may just require a little more work.

What am I talking about?
Zipcode data from sites such as ZipAtlas.com & Incomebyzipcode.com (Both 100% Free)


Why target Zipcodes?
Because like it or not, different demographics such as race, income levels, age groups, home ownership, property value, are purchasing, or desiring what you are selling differently.
And if you are targeting our product too broadly across all of these demographic types on Google Ads, the only one you are benefiting is Google or the Ad company.

Several months ago I took on a very large PPC client in the home services category running in 11 large US metro areas they were spending nearly 1 million a year on Google Ads.
The agency they were with prior to me, did an adequate job with keywords, ads and they were generating a good number of phone calls to the call center. But I noticed when I listened in on some of the recorded calls, a lot of the callers were interested until they were hit with the price.


I then went to ZipAtlas, went to the state then city we were targeting and at first I just started with "Median Household Income" at the zipcode level. (Example below of the Houston area)
http://zipatlas.com/us/tx/houston/zip-code-comparison/median-household-income.htm

Knowing what the companies average invoice was I was able to determine, that client making under 30k a year rarely converted. So I started targeting area codes with a median income of 40K or more.

After the first month when I ran the numbers my ad spend was down about 35%, the average call length nearly doubled, and booked clients was up about 15%. I now have a client for life.

So whats my point, stop blanketing the USA with national, state, or even locally with "X mile radius" campaigns, target by Zipcode of the demographic of your target audience.

Know your target audience and target them, if your ads do better with certain races, find out where high concentrations of that race live, if you are targeting lower, middle, or upper end incomes find out where they live and target only them, people of a certain age, housing status, education level, property value, target them and drastically improve your conversion ratio.

If this receives any interest, I can go a little more in-depth on how I use both sites above and some ways to save time finding prime potential customers. I use the the other website (incomebyzipecode.com) for gathering suburb data which for this particular client was very lucrative.


********
Disclaimer : The websites above are not mine, I have no affiliation with either, they just provide a free tool with good data. There may be others equally as good, possible better.
 

mattvei

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You're on an imaginitive path, I would be intereted in "go a little more in-depth on how I use both sites above and some ways to save time finding prime potential customers"
 

Drake01

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hi, buddy, I'm interesting how do you mix those 2 platforms to find your potential customer, because for local business i used to segment by miles radius, could you please give some tips, how do you work ??? thanks a lot
 

ThopHayt

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Geo-targeting has always been important. If your conversions give you any type of geo-data on the other end it can speed up the process and eliminate some of the guesswork too.

-ThopHayt
 

TheVigilante

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How did I miss this Zipatlas seems like a very useful site for running local ppc campaigns and seems like the ideal approach one would want to go with!
 
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Jaz

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Ok here's an example of how I would target, a new city for a "higher-end" service business let go with Seattle.

So I would start here (Seattle - Avg Median Income)

Then I would determine where my cut off for my service would be.
Generally, for "upper end" products and services I stay around an Average Median Income of 50K+. (This really is product dependant)

So for this example, I get 9 zipcodes 50+ ( There are 2 really close "49k+" depending on how much traffic I might take those also)

98177
98112
98199
98115
98136
98155
98117
98116
98166

Now when I first started doing this, I would just throw these in Google and be done.
Generally, I'll also throw a +% bid adjustment to the "really good" zip codes, in this example 98177, 98112, 98199, I might add +15%.

But with this strategy, you generally are missing the suburbs, where the big money is at.

That why I incorporate the use of https://www.incomebyzipcode.com/

So what ill do, is take my top zip codes and enter them in.

Let take the first one and see what we get.

And now we have a major hit.
98020 Edmonds WA
With a Median Income of $91,813.

And then I jump to the adjacent zip code which is:
98026
Median Income of $90,424 !!

I just work my way around the map until I hit either too far from my desired radius or the income is too low.

Btw I'm slapping a +30% bid adjustment on those 90k avg median income zips.


I hope, I'm explaining this well enough.
If not let me know and ill try to be a little more specific.
 
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