Marketers constantly try to pinpoint the ideal buyer persona for their next campaign. Age, interests, education, and location are significant factors when considering a new strategy.
When it comes to SaaS, e-commerce, and consulting, location may seem irrelevant.
You send the product online or get it fulfilled by Amazon or a shipping service. But the situation changes when you deal with a physical business like a store or a chain.
Let’s say you’ve got a campaign for a mom-and-pop store doing incredibly well locally. Now it’s time to expand. Marketing to the other side of the country won’t make much sense.
No one would drive hours to the store, which means it’s not worth it. Instead, a much better option is to localize ad spend and try getting conversions from neighboring cities before opening a new location.
For that to work, you must know how to compare campaign performance across different regions. Here are two solutions.
Pull location info through an API
The fastest and simplest way to pull location data is through API reports. You get the data from an API in the report but could run into a few issues.
The first thing is data consistency. Different APIs give different granularity. Let’s say you’ve done one campaign on Google and one on Facebook.
The data you get from Google will be much more thorough than the one you get from Facebook.
But you might not get everything you need. Google Ads doesn’t report on DMA, while Facebook does.
When the campaign ends, and you want to analyze performance, you won’t be able to compare the datasets.
You can do an A/B campaign on the same platform to avoid it.
This way, you can compare visuals, copy, and location differences with the same data consistency.
APIs have another issue, which is restricted breakdowns. If you go for the A/B campaign on Facebook and want to get multiple location fields along with the designated market area, the service will prevent you from getting it to avoid pulling incorrect data.
There’s a way to bypass this issue if you are making campaigns in the United States by mapping granularly.
But it won’t work if it’s an international campaign or you want to combine multiple countries.
Use a naming convention
Comparing campaign performance from different regions will be a major pain if you don’t use a naming convention. Instead of dealing with the default output, organize the points you will need.
You can include the description for the campaign, the start and end date, product, region, country, and DMA, and customize the rest.
Standardizing data ensures consistency, no matter which platform you use. To be more precise, you can even include region and country codes.
APIs can make mistakes, but it’s up to you to minimize them and organize the output as best as possible.
The entire marketing team needs to adhere to one naming convention. If not, the data will be scattered, mess with your CMS, and be impossible to analyze.
Instead of going for the perfect product market fit, you could drain the budget for a successful experiment with no real-life results.
What tools do you need?
A VPN is a must when you deal with online location data. Learning how to use a VPN takes less than ten minutes and will help you in every future campaign (check this tutorial). You can change the IP address of your device to a country of your choosing.
So, if you create a strategy for a campaign in another country, you can pretend to be there.
It’s a great way to do market research and see what works before you invest time and resources.
The content management system (CMS) is next on the list because it allows multiple people to create, edit, and publish content on a website.
You can get reports on how everything performs without going deep into the tech aspects of web development. CMSs have a great user interface, making them easy to use and hard to replace.
Finally, you need an SEO plugin or service, especially if you make campaigns for a local business. Tools that help you rank high on Google will increase traffic without overspending on ads. Search engine optimization is playing a long game.
So before you focus on that, make sure you’ve got a campaign that’s working, and slowly replace outreach with organic, inbound traffic.
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