I made the error of selecting the "show worldwide" option for one of my recent campaigns and started getting loads of clicks... but many of them are clearly junk clicks from places like South Africa or Middle East. I have already blocked a few countries, of course places like Nigeria are out. What other ones could you recommend? Is there any sort of blacklist where high fraud countries are listed? I want my campaign to show to as many places as possible, but don't want to show where it is clear that there are a bunch of crooks clicking ads for fraud.
I think check paypal help section. they have nice list of the blocked countries that they are not allowing to open accounts. It will give you some names to start with. Update: Here is the list of the countries that are allowed by them. Anguilla Argentina Australia Austria Belgium Brazil Canada Chile China Costa Rica Cyprus Czech Republic Denmark Dominican Republic Ecuador Estonia Finland France Germany Greece Hong Kong Hungary Iceland India Ireland Israel Italy Jamaica Japan Latvia Lithuania Luxembourg Malaysia Malta Mexico Netherlands New Zealand Norway Poland Portugal Singapore Slovakia Slovenia South Africa South Korea Spain Sweden Switzerland Taiwan Thailand Turkey United Kingdom United States of America Uruguay Venezuela
hmm .. basically i think europe traffic and US traffic is only worth the price of a click. Normally i just target US traffic only. It depends on what you are advertising, if a product, i would say US only. If it's only an adsense or simple website, i would say both US and Europe.
I do the reverse Fryman..I create campaigns for each specific country or region and target it. Usually you can add a lot to your conversion rate by writing ads specific to the country. It does take a long time but it pays off a whole lot better then SEO these days
Although it's a little roundabout, when I'm feeling lazy, I'll try to find programs that're US/UK/country-specific only (or specific to a certain groups - e.g. Hispanic dating) which saves a lot of targeting time.
I mainly go for the UK, USA, Australia and Canada. If you have a large, successful account I would suggest tracking where your sales are coming from before excluding countries.
No, there is not a specific Country that there is a high fraud like Nigeria that worth to filter out. The problem is that in one hand do not worth to pay the same bid for US targeting and countries like Nigeria. Also maybe do not worth to have partners search or content search for these countries. In other hand Google do not offers a practical tool for that and enabling these countries in Search network power up your Quality Score for competitive countries like US as these countries is not so competitive and you may get a great CTR there. The solution I use is to Clone the campaign and have one campaign targeting only US and another one targeting the Entire World. The campaign Targeting entire world you keep low bids, you dont let the partner search network enabled and you disable the content network or let very low bids like $0.01. The problem is to clone the campaign that is something not easy and to maintain the changes in both - that is very hard that you need to do changes in both - but the results are really grate!