Lore
Targeting International Traffic With Google Adwords
During the last few months, we’ve been helping the Charleston Regional Development Alliance (CRDA) expand their international reach with Google Adwords. By using a combination of the Google’s display network, targeted keyword bidding, and Youtube video ads, they’re well on their way to beating their international visitor acquisition targets for the year.
Background
The core function of the CRDA is responsible for helping to expand business in Charleston. They’re part of the team that helped land Boeing and many other recent projects over the years. You can check out some of the recent expansions and relocations they’ve been involved in.
We’ve been managing their paid media spend for several years, focused mainly on US and local searchers. This last year, they set an aggressive target to reach international visitors, and asked us to help execute. Here’s a breakdown of two of our strategies.
1. Assist The Sales Team During Key International Trade Shows
The CRDA team attends several major trade shows every year – some related to specific industries like Aerospace or Automotive. To support their sales team, we targeted people searching for information about these industries.
2. Support Key Target Industries
In addition to major industry trade shows, we saw an opportunity to target international searchers looking for information on two of our target industries: automotive and aerospace.
3. Capitalize on Existing Video Case Studies
The CRDA already had a wealth of case studies from International companies that decided to relocate or expand in Charleston. We used these videos to target international visitors on Youtube – both on Youtube and throughout the display network.
Results
You can see the spike in international visitors below. But we aren’t just concerned with traffic (anyone can pay a bunch of money and get unqualified traffic). We’re looking at downloads of key industry overviews and other goals set up in Google Analytics. The CRDA team also has a custom report we developed for each conference that gets emailed to them weekly.