How Google Adwords in Northern Ireland is disadvantaged.
The purpose of this article is to advertise an absurdity to motivate those responsible to fix the problem so local business in Northern Ireland can benefit.
There a lot to read so here is a summary:
Google provides location targeting
in its pay per click advertising called Adwords but BT's network set-up renders it useless in Northern Ireland.
BT have no incentive to fix this
since they are a partner with Yahoo, not Google.
Location targeting should be a very
useful way for business to cheaply advertise to their local catchment and it can even provide free brand building when Ads are seen but not clicked.
Northern Ireland suffers more than
anywhere else because British Telecom tells Google that Northern Ireland is in Glasgow over the water.
The solution is for Northern
Ireland business leaders and politicians to persuade BT to fix it to help local businesses here.
You can help by sharing this page
with your social media community.
The Problem
British Telecom tells Google that
Northern Ireland is in Glasgow. In fact British Telecom tells the whole internet that Northern Ireland is in Glasgow, sometimes
Edinburgh and occasionally London.
This is a problem because it denies local businesses in Northern Ireland the opportunity to target their advertising at their community in the most effective way. Take a look at the screen grab of a Google search page below.
I need a hypnotherapist (hypothetically of course) so I "Google it". Notice how there are lots of Ads aimed at people in Glasgow. But hey! I'm a few miles south of Belfast! What are the chances of me jumping onto a ferry and hitching to Glasgow? If I did that I would be better off with a psychotherapist.
Those Glasgow advertisers are correctly using Adwords' location targeting features to show their Ads to their own community. They probably don't realise their Google Ads are visible to the vast majority of the population of Northern Ireland and they are probably paying too much for their advertising. (They will get a needlessly low click through rate, leading to a poorer quality score, leading to an increased cost per click.)
Notice the Google Ads for hypnotherapists in Bradford and Bolton. They are clutching at straws because they appear to be showing local Ads to the whole nation. (Their click through rate is going to be near to zero).
So why is this a problem for Northern Ireland business?
If a hypnotherapist in Coleraine, for example,
wanted to advertise in this way to his or her local community hardly anybody in Coleraine would see the Ad because so far as the internet is
concerned the vast majority of Coleraine people are sitting in their homes in Glasgow.
Take another look at the picture above and replace Glasgow with your home town. That is how it should be, but BT makes it impossible.
By messing up the location of internet connections BT renders the location targeting features of Google Adwords useless for Northern Ireland businesses. It could be very useful to local businesses across Northern Ireland. Adwords experts can devise ways to make an improvement on this but most businesses have no chance.
Google isn't terribly happy about this but that is not the issue. It is time for Northern Ireland businesses to become aware that BT is denying them good effective and low cost advertising. This is where BT can help Northern Ireland business and earn credit for doing so.
Sometimes Google wastes its space
Search for
accountants and it matches a category in the Google feature called Google Places. So you will see something like
this:
Just imagine the same page but with truely local accountants appearing. That is what is supposed to happen.
The problem in perspective
I am aware that you might ask why I don't search for "accountant County Down"? My answer is that "I do, but others don't". Why should businesses be prevented from reaching those?
Think of their being two types of searcher, the novice and the seasoned.
Novice searchers want to buy but they haven't learnt that they need to include a location, like County Down to overcome BT's wayward settings. BT prevents Northern Ireland businesses from advertising to them.
Seasoned searchers know that their searches won't yield local results unless they include the location in their search. The problem won't occur for these searchers when they are looking to buy and it doesn't take long for a novice searcher to catch on and become seasoned.
Web marketeers know that there are links in the chain of events leading up to a sale. If I search for "accountant County Down" I am closer to making a spending decision that if I sought "accountant". When people search for "accountant" they are more likely at the research stage of their decision making. They are just gathering infomation and they are less likely to click an Ad. Because they are less likely to click Google looks at it as a minor problem.
When seasoned searchers are researching their spending decisions, Google will still show Ads anyway. Even if those searchers don't click the Ads there is value in local Ads being seen. Northern Ireland businesses are missing out on free brand building. Seasoned searchers will make a lot of searches without including " Northern Ireland" in their search (17 keystrokes!).
This is a national problem but it is at its worst in Northern Ireland because of that stretch of water. But that provides an opportunity because if it is ever going to be fixed this is the place to start.
Nobody knows just how beneficial correct location targeting would be to local businesses since they have never had the opportunity to try it. It has never worked the way it should have. Replacing Glasgow Ads with Ads from local businesses has got to benefit local business.
Google tries
Google is a great experimenter. It tries
things out and measures the effect. At the moment, when Google Places (the Google Map thing) shows up they put a little prompt on the left
hand side of the page telling you that you are in Glasgow. They hope you will correct them so they know where you really are. It looks like this:
It has been shown for "opt-ins" like this the uptake is very low. It is a good idea but it is not a winner. It doesn't show up all the time and it isn't the cure. There is no substitute for a proper fix.
How does BT manage to make it so difficult for NI local business to advertise?
When you switch on your broadband
router (your home hub) it goes through a synchronisation process. During this phase the network allocates to your connection a unique number
from a pool of available numbers. That number is your IP address for your connection. There is nobody else on the internet with the same IP
address while it is allocated to you. Reboot your router and you'll get a different IP address.
The internet network stores a table of IP address ranges and the network is told a location for each range. It appears that for the whole of Northern Ireland British Telecom takes IP addresses from the pool that belongs to Glasgow. It is likely that the equipment in the BT office in Belfast beams all traffic over to Glasgow in a high speed link. When that link gets clogged up new connections go via other routes. That explains why we are sometimes in Edinburgh and occasionally in London. Hope you are following all of this!
Nothing malicious
There is no suggestion that there was any plan
behind this set-up. BT are probably following the standard way of doing things in the most cost effective way and this bizarre situation is
simply a consequence of the way things are done. Poor old Northern Ireland. Just another barrier to prosperity. You could
say BT is being a bit lazy in not making the network better but, probably, nobody influential enough has asked them to fix it. Until now! See
the section on How you can help the NI business community.
This might sound like BT bashing but truely its nothing more that highlighting the problem. Call it robust encouragement, an opportunity.
The Solution
You might have noticed green boxes springing
up by the roadside across Northern Ireland. BT has been busy rolling out its high speed broadband service across the countryside.
For the network to work properly each of these boxes has a unique identity so that the internet traffic can be routed correctly. BT's software knows each ID and it knows the location of each box. When allocating the IP address to your router it could use the green box ID to look up the location and put that into the IP address table so the internet has a much better idea of the approximate location of your router. Not Glasgow!
It's a software change and any decent programmer knows how to do it. It's just a question of will.
BT might say it is not possible because the IP addresses are allocated in large blocks and the network does not permit ... blah de blah de blah. They might even say it is beyond their control because it is a feature of equipment they bought from someone else. But the fact remains that once everybody in Northern Ireland knows that British Telecom tells Google that Northern Ireland is in Glasgow BT are likely to want to improve things for us.
An opportunity for BT
BT have been advertising their presence in
Northern Ireland on TV. They have been busy improving their network and their marketing department wants us to be more aware of BT. If they
fix this problem then we would know that they really care and BT could use that to their advantage in their marketing. It is much better than
being known for the phrase British Telecom tells Google that Northern Ireland is in Glasgow.
Overcoming reluctance
British Telecom is a business partner of Yahoo
who competes with Google. BT therefore does not have a reason to help Google with its Adwords income.
However, BT does business in Northern Ireland and it has a relationship with the Northern Ireland business community. BT will no doubt listen to local politicians and business leaders who are keen to improve the economy here. If BT needs an incentive to fix the problem then it is these people who should encourage BT. The question is how can the movers and shakers become informed. The answer to that is in the section below.
Export pre-occupation
Politicians and business leaders are keen to
promote exports from NI to get a positive flow of wealth. That's good of course but preventing money leaving NI is good too. Buying local is
beneficial. How many times have you had to send for something from "over the water" and paid extra to get it shipped? I would much
rather see a local Ad for the product, pay less and keep the profits in the local economy.
How you can help the Northern Ireland business community
In a word communicate! If
business leaders and government are able to recognise this problem then they can ask BT to fix it. Tell your contacts about this problem
even if you don't know the movers and shakers. You never know, who knows, who needs to know (to paraphrase).
Do you blog or do you have a website? If so please mention this problem with a link to this page.
Do use Facebook? If so please share this page with your friends as well as like it. And please don't forget the other social media tools like LinkedIn, Digg and StumbleUpon.
Footnote
Is this page just for marketing? The local businesses who would be the main beneficiaries would probably have small Adwords budgets and not be my optimum customers. If this problem gets fixed I'll post a page to show how to set things up - free. But, if you know any Ad agencies who need steering around the Adwords quicksand....
This is more an exercise to use social media to communicate and motivate to the benefit of the local business community in Northern Ireland and ultimately the rest of the UK.
Hillsborough near Belfast, County Down, Northern Ireland. Mob 07972 637 569