I'm trying to understand the geo performance report in the Adwords API. Specifically, this note is tripping me up

Note: If you request both IsTargetingLocation values in your predicate and either do not limit by LocationType or request both LocationType values in your predicate, then the same impression's statistics may appear in multiple rows of the report. Therefore, statistic totals from your report could be much higher than totals from other reports such as the CAMPAIGN_PERFORMANCE_REPORT.

The way I understand it is, campaigns have a target location like New York. The field IsTargetingLocation can be true or false, where true means the corresponding impressions occurred in the target location and false means they didn't.

Additionally, the field LocationType can be either "Location of interest" (someone in Alabama is interested in New York) or "Physical location".

How can including both of these fields create double-counting? Someone is either in New York (IsTargetingLocation = true and LocationType = "Physical location") or they aren't (IsTargetingLocation = false and LocationType = "Location of interest").

Tag:google-ads-api

4 comments.

  1. Ben

    I think I have a better understanding of this now..

    When you set up a campaign, you set up target locations. For example, suppose I target New York. I can choose to apply this target via physical location, location of interest, or both.

    Suppose I've chosen to target people based on both location criteria..

    Scenario 1:

    Bob is physically located in New York, and he searches for "pizza restaurants". In this case, the geo performance report should return one record like

    Location IsTargetingLocation LocationType 1: New York TRUE LOCATION_OF_PRESENCE Scenario 2:

    Bob is physically located in New York, and he searches for "new york pizza restaurants". In this case, the geo performance report should return two records like

    Location IsTargetingLocation LocationType 1: New York ? LOCATION_OF_PRESENCE 2: New York ? LOCATION_OF_INTEREST

    In this case, I suspect one row will have IsTargetingLocation = TRUE and the other will be FALSE. The question is, did Google show Bob our ad because he was interested in New York or because he was physically located in New York? I suspect google attributes the ad display to one of these and not both, but I could be wrong here.

    Scenario 3:

    Bob is physically located in California, and he searches for "new york pizza restaurants". In this case, the geo performance report should return two records like

    Location IsTargetingLocation LocationType 1: California FALSE LOCATION_OF_PRESENCE 2: New York TRUE LOCATION_OF_INTEREST
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  2. dorian

    IIRC, the IsTargetingLocation field indicates whether this was an actively targeted location, i.e. a CampaignCriterion of type LOCATION was triggering the impression.

    So, if you target New Yorkers and somebody is looking for content about California, two impressions will be returned:

    One for New York with LocationType "Physical Location" and the IsTargetingLocation flag set An additional one for California with LocationType "Location of interest" and the IsTargetingLocation flag not set
    Reply
    1. Ben

      Thanks! This makes sense. Unless you have a source though, I'm going to wait a few days for others to chime in before accepting this as the correct answer.

      Reply
    2. dorian

      @Ben I've looked through the Adwords API forum and couldn't find a specific definition of IsTargetingLocation. However this should be simple to test, just set up a small test campaign where you only target one specific location and check the Geo Performace Report after you collect a couple of impressions.

      Reply

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