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If you haven’t noticed, Google has quietly made changes to its location targeting options in AdWords in late October. Actually, I found out about the changes during my AdWords certification renewal exam, so I was quite shocked to see the completely different location targeting interface (and Google can you please update the exam questions?!).

Anyways, the new interface makes it easier to search for locations you wishes to target and also provides “reach numbers” to help you estimate the audience within you selected target (Reach is an estimate of the number of users in a selected location target, based on unique cookies).

So, how easy is it to search for locations now? Very easy!!

Simply type in the name of the city you wish to target (and the built-in auto-suggest function is really handy), and a list of eligible choice will show up. Just click on the “add” button beside the name of the city you wish to target, then you are set. And of course, you can choose to exclude the city as well, just simply by click on “exclude”.

Not going into too much detail here. You can get more info on the new features here from Google’s Adwords blog:

http://adwords.blogspot.com/search?updated-max=2011-10-31T08:15:00-07:00&max-results=10

What I’m going to focus here though, are features that Google took out during this makeover which in my opinions, are very disappointing.

1. Custom shape targeting is gone! Advertisers can no longer draw unique shape on the map to define the boundaries of their targeting areas. At the moment, Google still supports this feature for advertisers who are already using it, but only till the end of the year though. How to work around this? Advertisers are advised to run a geo-targeting report to find out which regions they were getting traffic from and add them back as individual locations.
2. Bundle targeting is removed as well! It used to be that advertisers could choose to target US & Canada as a bundle or All Countries & Regions as a bundle and now this feature is longer presented. It might not be a big deal for local business, but imagine how annoying it’s going to be for business that targets globally now they have to add all the 100+ countries one by one. You can argue that companies that advertise globally should have separate campaigns for each region or country anyways, so they have to pick out each country one by one regardless (this leads to the third point). Yes, that is the optimal scenario, but there are also small-medium size businesses that just don’t have enough budgets to spread across 100+ campaigns.
3. Browse function is gone! It used to be that advertisers can browse through the list of available targeting locations and pick out the ones they choose to target and now this is no longer available. Assuming I want to target all countries and regions, but I don’t know all the names of the different countries (be honest, who does?), what am I gonna do?! Sadly, I haven’t figure out a way around this.

I’m not really sure whether it’s just me not being able to find the missing features mentioned above in the new interface or Google had really taken them out, but aside from the newly integrated search function, the revamped location targeting interface feels like a downgrade to me.

Let me know if you guys are able to dig up those features. That would be much appreciated.

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