Had a talk with a small biz owner that totally shifted how I look at ad targeting

I was helping my cousin setup Google Ads for her bakery in Phoenix last week. She kept asking why I was picking all these super specific interests and locations. She said 'why not just show it to everyone in the city? more eyes = more sales right?' That hit me different because I realized regular people don't get how wasted spend works. I showed her a $500 campaign where we saved like $200 by excluding people 20 miles away who never visit her neighborhood. Has anyone else had that moment where you explain frequency capping or lookalike audiences to a client and they totally don't get it until you show the numbers?

2 comments

2 Comments

tylerw921mo ago

oh man, this is exactly what happened to my buddy who runs a little coffee shop. he was dead set on running ads to the whole county cause he thought 'more people seeing it means more customers.' i showed him his google analytics and like 90% of his website visitors were from a three block radius around his shop. we redid his campaign to just target that little area and his cost per click dropped from like 80 cents to 20 cents. he was blown away that all those people 15 miles away were just clicking an ad for a coffee shop they'd never drive to.

anthony1271mo ago

Ngl that 80 cents to 20 cents drop is wild. How long did it take your buddy to actually believe the data and switch his targeting?