Location Targeting In Google Shopping (Northern Ireland, UK)

I have a client who was wondering recently why their products were not showing in Google Shopping for them.

The have a product listing ads campaign (obviously). A region of the UK was added as a negative location in the product listing ads campaign.

The IP address of their office network happens to be in that excluded region.

OK, you think, it would be fairy logical for Google to assume that they shouldn’t be shown the products as their IP address in in the excluded region.

But, luckily, Google Shopping allows you to specify your location at the top left of the screen :-

[screen shot]

So this should override the (often incorrect) location information they have from the IP address, right? WRONG!

AdWords support have confirmed that (unbelievably) it is the case that if you have an IP address in an excluded area then this will over-ride anything that you set manually in Google Shopping.

Quite why they give you the ability to set the location you are interested in when they then completely ignore it is beyond me. It wouldn’t be so bad if IP addresses were in any way accurate in the UK but they are not (mine is now London, used to Sheffield, and I live in NORTHERN IRELAND).

When I eventually got AdWords support to understand the stupidity of the current set up they emailed me a link to add this as customer feedback…. Sigh..