What Is It?
The Geo HeatMap offers a great visualization of the traffic your campaigns are driving to your website. It also gives you a breakdown of how different cities, regions, and countries are performing in the form of a map and table.
Why Use It?
The tool allows you to:
Quickly understand how your campaigns perform across different locations.
Analyze metrics like ROAS across locations. You can find areas that deliver strong returns and increase bids, or create dedicated campaigns to capture more valuable traffic.
Spot underperforming or irrelevant locations that increase costs, using the visual red and green indicators.
Visualization Modes
There are two types of visualization modes available in Geo HeatMap that make it easier for you to visualize and analyze.
Bubble Mode
The bubbles get combined for places when you zoom in and out and give you cumulative data for multiple locations.
Non-Bubble Mode
The non-bubble mode has its own circle for each place that is colored red or green to reflect the performance.
What do the red and green markings mean?
The red markings signify an underperforming location, and the green ones indicate regions that are performing well.
Performance is determined by calculating the average of the selected metric across the divisions of the chosen level. Based on this calculated average, a division is marked as:
red, if the metric falls below the average, and
green, if the metric is greater than or equal to the average.
For Example, in the screenshot above, the metric selected is 'Impressions' and the data is segmented at the 'Region Level'. In this case, the system calculates the average of impressions across all available regions. Any regions above or below the average are marked green and red respectively.
Use Cases
Identify High-Performing Locations
Problem: You are running campaigns across multiple cities or regions, but are unsure which locations are actually driving the best return.
Solution: The tool can visualize campaign performance by city, region, or country on a map. By selecting metrics such as ROAS, conversions, or impressions, you can quickly identify locations that perform better than average.
The green markings highlight high-performing areas, allowing you to focus on locations that generate the highest returns. You can increase bids, allocate more budget, or create dedicated campaigns to capture more traffic and conversions from these regions.
Exlude Irrelevant Traffic
Problem: Irrelevant clicks increase your advertising costs and reduce the overall efficiency of your campaigns.
Solution: The tool helps you quickly identify locations that generate high traffic but low conversions. Red markings on the map indicate underperforming regions based on the selected metric.
You can analyze these areas directly from the visualization and identify locations that are not generating meaningful results.
Tips on how to use it
Get Google Ads insights by geography.
Based on the data available, you can get recommendations on increasing bids for geographies (by city, region, or country) that have a higher ROAS. Getting insights on how the campaigns are performing by location also helps target the right kind of audience.
Make sure ads are showing in the right geography.
Whenever you are using Geo HeatMap, ensure that the account is getting data from the right geographies. If you notice a lot of clicks coming from a country/city that has zero conversions, your ad might be driving irrelevant traffic and driving up the cost. Then it may be a good idea to either exclude that geography or create a separate campaign and optimize for it.
For example, ads for a company selling products for a local area are showing in locations where they don’t ship their products. This means that they are unnecessarily wasting money on locations that will not result in sales.
You can check some frequently asked questions here.
Demo Video