It may appear as if the counsel below is solely for those in real estate, there is application in other places. There are 2 crowds of people on the hunt for your business.

1.Someone who resides in your locale - your city or state - who may search for "real estate", "dentist", "churches", or "restaurant" and the results he desires to see are only from the area he lives in. When he comes looking; there you will be.

2.Someone not in the same region at all (or maybe Google is unable to determine where he is), searches for services in your region. On Google he searches for "movers in Palo Alto", "Palo Alto real estate", or "hotels in Palo Alto", desiring results for Palo Alto only. Maybe he is on vacation, planning a move, or wanting to invest in Palo Alto.

In actuality he could live in Palo Alto but he may be at that time in San Francisco, Cleveland, Calgary, Melbourne, or Hong Kong. He is nonetheless looking on Google in Palo Alto for your services.

One way or the other when he comes calling, you are there, ready to answer.

Getting To The First Person

You can initiate two different AdWords campaigns, because you are targeting these two sets of people. You can do that by selecting regional targeting when you first set up your campaign.

Then you choose your country, followed by your state/province, and even a city or group of cities.

Getting To The Second Person

Perhaps you want to advertise for California real estate. You would want to set up your campaign for national or even international traffic, however you will use local search terms like "Santa Barbara real estate" or Bakersfield real estate", because, most likely there will be folks nationally ore even internationally, using these search keywords.

Create a list of key word terms by using a map or list of cities from a website, like this one:

California real estate

Southern California real estate

Healdsburg real estate

Villa Real real estate

Berkeley real estate

Buy a home in Eureka

Purchase homes in Mammoth Lakes

Buy a home in Palm Springs

Buy homes Sausalito

By using the keyword list from the regional campaign (that is a general list) and, with a spreadsheet, combining it (in a mix and match fashion) with a list of cities or towns, you can produce a long, quick keyword campaign.

Either way, you'll end up with a huge keyword list: 95 percent of them will never get searches, and the other 5 percent may only get a few. However, it doesn't cost anything to bid on these keywords if nobody clicks, and when people do click, they'll only be five or ten cents. Not much traffic, but what you do get will be bargain priced. You should still buy generic keywords in your local campaign, but these local keywords in a nationwide campaign will bring very cheap clicks, mostly.

Your real estate Google account would be arranged like this:

Campaign #1: California Targeting Only Group 1: Real estate Group 2: Buy homes

Campaign #2: National Targeting-entire USA Group 1: California real estate Group 2: Buy homes California

Now you have both bases covered, and you'll be getting as much traffic as possible for your local market. The key is that you're not leaving out people in other geographic locations who are seriously looking for what you offer.

Google has great features to help you target your customers. You can use your businesses physical address or longitude and latitude to aim at searches within a specified area. You also can customize a coordinate set that you would like to aim for.

Hone Your Chops On A Local Test Campaign Before You Go National

A time tested advertisers practice is to use a small market to test an idea before you invest large amounts of money on a widespread campaign. In this day and age the risks for a national campaign may seem insignificant, with pay-per-click, daily budgets and the ability to turn the campaign on and off as you like, but there is something to be said for running small area ad tests first.

For example, if you sell advice to investors, you might start just with investors in New York State. The advantage? You don't need to worry nearly as much about your daily budget. If your cash reserves are limited, you can choose this smaller market to start off in, and if in the first few weeks or months it's not profitable, you're not forced to shut the entire thing down for fear of quickly going bankrupt. Make the sales process profitable in a smaller market, and then go national.

At that time you can go forward with confidence because you have tested your method and you know that every dollar you spend is going to be returned to you in multiples. A bonus for you that have stiff competition; this is a great way to conceal what you are doing till it is perfected.