There is no recommended minimum distance because the granularity of
the targeting really depends on the information we are able to pull
from an individuals IP address. For example, the Google IP address
only indicates ‘California’ rather than ‘Mountain View, California’.
In more densely populated areas, the IP information tends to be
better, so more granular targeting is possible; however, as a rule of
thumb, targeting larger areas (states) will be more accurate than
targeting portions of a city. My suggestion is to start granular and
see what kind of results you get. This will give you a good idea of
exactly how accurate the targeting is.

Finally, there are several good FAQs on location targeting in the Help
Center that may be helpful: http://adwords.google.com/support/bin/topic.py?topic=21.

Best,
AdWordsPro Sarah

On Sep 9, 1:30 pm, Mpls-baseball wrote:

Typically, you shouldn't go smaller than 20 or 30 miles around, since
if your radius is too small, it's likely you'll miss traffic from
people that are actually in your target area. You might also consider
how local your business is (will people be willing to travel X
distance?) and think about the trade-off between expanding the area to
capture more false positives or shrinking the area and risk not
reaching people that you actually want to because of their IP. If
you're in a rural area, you might want to consider including the
nearest metropolis if you know that IPs in your area are identified as
a particular city or region.

Hopefully other custom-area users will give us their thoughts too!

~AdWordsPro.Steph

On Sep 9, 1:30 pm, Mpls-baseball wrote: