It's local. I travel often and see the ads targeting the areas I am in.

My ISP has an office in a city 200 miles away. I often see local ads as if Google is assuming I'm in that city. It's a waste of space.

There was a discussion about this on the AdWords forum a while back. The accuracy of local targeting may not be as accurate as some assume.

FarmBoy

Agreed Farmboy - apparently I live 100 miles away according to Google. 100 miles might not be much in the US, but in the UK, France is less than 100 miles from England.

Hi all,

AdSense uses geotargeting to serve Google ads to your pages - ads are specific to a user's region and language, based on their IP address. By selecting a country from the drop-down list, you can see what ads are being shown to visitors from different areas of the globe.

ASA

...ads are specific to a user's region and language...

How large is a region? In the U.S., is a region as large as a city, a county, a state, a group of states, etc.?

FarmBoy

If my own experience is of any use, I've seen ads for as near as San Diego (>500 miles) and as far away as New York (>3,000 miles). I'm located in Northern Nevada and neither of those locations could possibly be considered as local. It might be due to the fact that my ISP is all over the country and my IP can and does change when I reboot my router. I probably can get IP numbers that have been used just about anywhere in the country. I personally think trying to geotarget is a waste of time and resources. It just can't fly right.

While I readily admit that geotargeting is hard to do accurately because of the way people access the internet, isn't it also possible that some Adsense advertisers are specifically (and stupidly?) requesting their ads to be geotargetted to areas that don't seem appropriate to the ad copy?

Also, Google shows ads by using their knowledge about you using your own past search history and other matrix

Also, Google shows ads by using their knowledge about you using your own past search history and other matrix

If that's the case, their system is broken. I'm the only person who uses my computer and I see ads for services I've never searched for, have no need for and are in a city 200 miles away.

FarmBoy

Looking at what appears on my site it looks as if some advertisers go for local based keywords and others go for geo targetting. I still run a locality based site for an organisation in an area that I used to live in. I see a variety of local ads, mostly for that locality but eratically for places a couple of hundred miles away. Whenever my router reboots I get new IP and often reconnect through a different location. Looking at my site stats I have seen myself supposedly located in London, Milton Keynes and Southampton.