So, overall costs for me were  £8.17, which brought in 3 enquiries and one new customer (from Belfast).

My return on investment for these campaigns was 4284%.

The amount of time I spent monitoring and tweaking these campaigns during March was approximately 10 minutes.

That’s a return on my time and money that I’m pretty happy with.

As an aside, I have cut back on my spend in the Republic of Ireland, but only because in my line of business, face to face meetings are usually required…

One thing not really made clear in the Google help about Phrase Match is whether it uses whole words as the basis for whether a search will activate your adverts.

Here is a snippet from https://adwords.google.co.uk/support/aw/bin/answer.py?hl=en-uk&answer=6100:-

Phrase Match

If you enter your keyword in quotation marks, as in “tennis shoes”, your ad would be eligible to appear when a user searches on the phrase tennis shoes, with the words in that order. It can also appear for searches that contain other terms as long as it includes the exact phrase you’ve specified.

Phrase match keyword:	Ads may show on searches for:	Ads won’t show on searches for:
“tennis shoes”	red tennis shoes buy tennis shoes tennis shoes photo	shoes for tennis tennis shoe tennis trainers

Phrase match is more targeted than broad match, but more flexible than exact match.

This is easy to follow. No Problems.

BUT

What if I want to target people who are searching for something “Northern Ireland” related.

There are a lot of different ways for someone to indicate they are looking for something specific to Northern Ireland.

For example, they could type in

“N.I”

“N.I.”

“N.Ireland”

and a lot of other similar phrases.

So say I sold  blue widgets in the Northern Ireland area, and wanted to be lazy, and catch each of the 3 combinations above, it might be logical to assume I could use phrase match and just put in my keyword list:-

“blue widgets n.i”

I’m afraid not…. Google reckons that “blue widgets n.i” is NOT a phrase match for the search term “blue widgets n.ireland”.  This seems a bit counter intuitive to me – but that’s how it works.

So if you do want to catch as much ‘Northern Ireland’ related search traffic as possible, it looks like you will have to build a big keyword list, or else rely on ‘broad match’….

In fact if you do live in Northern Ireland, here is a good starting point for your keyword list (Just replace the ‘Keyword’ text with ‘Blue Widgets’ or whatever is relevant to you:-

NI Keyword
N I Keyword
N.I Keyword
N.I. Keyword
N.Ireland Keyword
N. Ireland Keyword
Northern Ireland Keyword
Keyword NI
Keyword N I
Keyword N.I
Keyword N.I.
Keyword N.Ireland
Keyword N. Ireland
Keyword Northern Ireland
“NI Keyword”
“N I Keyword”
“N.I Keyword”
“N.I. Keyword”
“N.Ireland Keyword”
“N. Ireland Keyword”
“Northern Ireland Keyword”
“Keyword NI”
“Keyword N I”
“Keyword N.I”
“Keyword N.I.”
“Keyword N.Ireland”
“Keyword N. Ireland”
“Keyword Northern Ireland”
[NI Keyword]
[N I Keyword]
[N.I Keyword]
[N.I. Keyword]
[N.Ireland Keyword]
[N. Ireland Keyword]
[Northern Ireland Keyword]
[Keyword NI]
[Keyword N I]
[Keyword N.I]
[Keyword N.I.]
[Keyword N.Ireland]
[Keyword N. Ireland]
[Keyword Northern Ireland]

I typed in a number of keywords which I reckoned would get a relatively high search volume all over the UK (did I mention that this was very ‘unscientific’?)

Then I asked for traffic estimates solely for the ‘Northern Ireland’ region.  Here are the results:-

I then asked for the results from ‘England’, ‘Wales’, ‘Scotland’ :-

Which means that if Google Geo Targeting is to be believed, the number of Google users in Northern Ireland is approx 0.66% that of Great Britain, or that the population of Great Britain is approx 152 times that of Northern Ireland!

Here is the mid 2008 UK population statistics taken from http://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?ID=6

That is a BIG margin of error…

How do you get round this when setting up a Google Adwords Campaign that targets only Northern Ireland?

There is no perfect way of doing it *as far as I know*.

Adwords regional targeting now allows users that Google knows are physically located outside of your region to see your advert *if* they type in specific keywords that you are targeting in that campaign (provided you are specifying your geographic area using ‘Regions’ rather than ‘Custom’).

So, if I have a company that sells blue widgets, but only ships to Northern Ireland, I could set up a campaign that targets ‘Northern Ireland’, and has the following keywords (in summary):-

[blue widgets]

[blue widgets northern ireland]

[northern ireland blue widgets]

[n.i. blue widgets]

[blue widgets belfast]

etc. etc….

My Blue Widget advert will now show if someone with a Northern Ireland IP address types in “blue widgets” in Google.  It will also show if someone who has an IP Address located in Great Britain types in “blue widgets northern ireland” or “blue widgets belfast” etc..

*Update*
To Summarise, if you are targeting Northern Ireland, and the AdWords Traffic Estimator tool keeps saying ‘Not enough data to give estimates’, then try targeting England, Wales and Scotland, then divide that result by 150 to get your Northern Ireland Estimates!

*Disclaimer* – Again, this is only a very rough estimate, and hopefully, with time Google will get better at targeting Northern Ireland as a region…