Simple Targeting Tweaks to Optimize Your Google Ads Spend

Have you started investing in Google Ads but found the leads you’re getting aren’t exactly who you were hoping for? Are you feeling your ad dollars aren’t being spent as efficiently as you’d like?

The bad news is that this is a common and frustrating grievance among DIY Google Ads managers. 

But the good news is there’s a simple fix—if you know what to look for. 

With a few basic tweaks to Google Ads’ default targeting settings, you can reduce the waste of your ad dollars and hyperfocus your spend on the audience that’s most likely to convert into qualified coworking leads.

The 3 Google Ads targets you need to understand

When it comes to spending your ad dollars more effectively and ensuring you’re getting the leads you actually want, it all comes down to three main targeting settings: location, demographics, and audience. 

Location

Your Google Ads location settings are one of the most fundamental components of your campaign and one of the first things you set up when you’re getting it underway. 

These targets allow you to hyperfocus on an audience within a specific geographic area.

But location targeting is also one of the easiest places to make costly mistakes with your Google Ads campaign. It’s a common mistake to opt for broad, unspecific location parameters rather than using modifiers that help hone in on your target audience. 

There are three basic location modifiers you can implement in your campaign.

1. City, region, or country

As the name suggests, this modifier allows you to target audiences within a certain city, region, or country. 

And while it’s important to target your ads to the right place, the challenge with these targets is that the parameters are fairly rigid and can sometimes exclude certain audiences.

For instance, if your coworking space is situated in a dense metropolis where the population is sufficient to support your business, a city-specific modifier might be optimal since you can find every member you need within city boundaries. 

On the other hand, if your coworking space is close to city limits, a city-specific focus could cause you to miss out on leads by excluding audiences in nearby municipalities who might still be in close enough proximity that your space could be convenient for them.

That’s why it’s common to use location targets in tandem with radius targets. 

2. Radius

Unlike city, region, or country targets, which focus solely on a city’s geographic boundaries, radius targets allow you to effectively drop a pin on a map and target audiences within a specific radius of it. 

We typically recommend capping this radius at a maximum distance of fifteen minutes from your space.

The biggest benefit of radius targeting is that it removes the limitations of city or regional boundaries and allows you to instead reach leads based on their proximity to your space.

After all, there could be people in your own city who would still have to commute too far to make use of your coworking space. So, reaching them with a Google ad would be a waste of your time and resources. 

3. Zip code or postal code

While it’s less frequently utilized than location and radius targets, you can also tailor your Google Ads targeting by zip code or postal code. 

This can be an effective strategy for coworking spaces in dense metropolitan areas where a city target would be too broad. Focusing on a specific zip or postal code can help parcel out specific areas within that city.

It can also be helpful in rural areas where the goal is to broaden the target range. In those areas, city boundaries can actually be quite limiting whereas zip or postal codes cover an entire area without gaps. 

By dialing in your location targeting, you can focus your ad spend on audiences within an appropriate proximity to your space without wasting your ad spend on those that aren’t.

Pro-Tip:

By default, Google follows your target locations based on “Present or interest”. This is defined by Google as People in, regularly in, or who’ve shown interest in your target locations. If you choose to use this recommendation, learn how to exclude ads from certain countries to reduce wasted ad spend.

Want to benchmark your Google Ads performance?
Checkout our Google Ads Blueprint.

Demographics

The next targeting tool you can tap into pertains to the age, gender, and household income of the audiences who will be seeing your ads.

This is especially important for coworking space operators because it allows you to either tap into these audiences or exclude them completely depending on what you’re hoping to achieve. 

Why would this matter to you? There are a few reasons.

Finding the right audience for your price point 

If your space is high-end and your services are priced accordingly, targeting audiences in higher income brackets will help you exclude potential audiences who might be seeking a more cost-efficient option.

Targeting your ads according to your services

Demographics targeting can help you tailor your Google Ads for each of your services.

For example, if your private office users are typically older professionals in higher income brackets and your coworking members are generally younger professionals with less disposable income, you can target different ads for each of these services (at Spacefully, we refer to these as Tracks) to reach only the audiences who are most likely to be interested in them.

When to use demographics targets

As a best practice, you should avoid tailoring these targets until you’ve run a few Google Ads campaigns and have received results you can analyze and interpret. 

Why?

Because the results of your campaigns can tell you how to better focus your efforts going forward.

For example, if you’re receiving inquiries from students in search of a place to study and they’re misaligned with your services and target audience, you can tweak your demographics settings to exclude people in the 18- to 24-year-old age bracket. 

Beyond that, if you’re not clear who’s most interested in each of your services, running a few campaigns and analyzing the results can provide you with clarity and direction to improve your future campaign targets. 

Multi-Location Tip:

Leverage demographic data from Google Analytics to identify the demographics of your existing website visitors. Take this one step further by isolating your member activity by viewing member only traffic by analyzing your member portal data. Finally, compare demographics by location to see if location based adjustments should be made.

Want to benchmark your Google Ads performance?
Checkout our Google Ads Blueprint.

Audience 

When you want to dive deeper into the details of your audience and expand beyond their location and demographics, audience targets allow you to explore not only their traits and attributes but also who they are as people. 

This includes things like:

  • Interests
  • Hobbies
  • Travel habits
  • Modes of transportation
  • Professional tools they use
  • Consumer habits and preferences

While audience targets aren’t commonly used for coworking spaces, they can be impactfully applied in very specific situations, such as reaching business travelers who may be in search of out-of-town meeting space.

The common pitfalls of poorly done Google Ads targets

Now that you’re familiar with the three key Google Ads targets you can use to hyperfocus your campaigns, it’s important to understand where most DIY ads managers go wrong so you can avoid falling into these common pitfalls.

Google Ads targeting settings aren’t exactly intuitive 

These key Google Ads targeting settings are notoriously easy to inadvertently skip over. 

While Google will prompt you to set a location for your campaign, it’s common to simply set a range that’s significantly larger than it needs to be. 

And in doing so, you risk wasting a ton of money on your ad spend by reaching audiences that aren’t relevant to your space.

Google will revert to its defaults if you don’t instruct it otherwise 

If you don’t specify the goals and parameters of your Google Ads campaign, Google’s algorithm will automatically revert to what it assumes your goals to be.

In general, its default is to simply focus your ad spend on wherever you’re getting the most clicks, even if it’s not actually the demographic you want to reach.

So, you might find yourself paying for clicks from people who aren’t aligned with your target audience.

Google Ads is a powerful tool for bringing qualified new coworking leads into your doors. But it’s a complex platform with a ton of different options to optimize its performance.

Whether you’re setting up a brand new Google Ads campaign or trying to optimize an existing one, focus on digging a little deeper into your targets to ensure you’re reaching the right people and reducing any waste in your advertising budget.

And if you’re unsure where to start, Spacefully is here to help. We use our industry-specific expertise to help coworking spaces to attract new qualified leads. If you’d like to learn how we can supercharge your lead generation and help you bring new members into your coworking space, sign up for our Google Ads Blueprint today.