Negative of negative? (positive)

[Samir Sabri]

Hello

As we are using the geo targeting feature, we need to reduce the number of operations that will be implemented. Of course, exclusion or negative location type would greatly help. However, what if the excluded county has a zip code that we need to target?

Kindly check the diagram example below, it has targeted zip codes (pink circles) and excluded zip codes (white circles).

As most of targeted zip codes are within stateA, so we will add one ADD operation for stateA to include most of our target zip codes in one shot. However countyB needs to be excluded, so we create an operation with operator ADD of NegativeCampaignCriterion for countyB.

Now the question is, how can we exclude that pink zip code (at cityZ/countyB) from being excluded in the negative countyB? shall we just add an operation for it to include it? would this override the negative countyB?

Also, is there any ads API that we can pass zipcodes to, and return an optimized query of inclusion and exclusion at state/county/city level? if not, any recommendation here?

Thank you in advance.

[Google Ads API Forum Advisor Prod]

Hi Samir,

 

Thank you for bringing up this question of a targeted location having an exclusion in it with the exclusion itself having a smaller targeted location within. This won't work, there's no targeting within an excluded area. When I tried to do this in the UI, a warning came up that "your exclusion cancels out some of your targeted locations". The warning only came up when I targeted a borough in an excluded city that was excluded from the state it was in. Attached is a screenshot of the attempt.

 

You can bring up with https://support.google.com/google-ads/gethelp your request to make the smallest region entity the determinator of location status regardless of the status of the larger inclusive location status.

 

Regarding what you can do now with current functionality, how about targeting county a, county d, county c and the zip code in city z?

 

The way to do that in in the Ads API would be Location Targeting, there are code snippets and instructions for looking up, excluding and including locations.

 

Regards,

 

Aryeh Baker Google Ads API Team

 

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