Tip: How to see adwords ads if you live in a weird country!

[Harry Behrens]

(Disclaimer: This tip is probably a basic thing that every veteran marketer already knows, but since I only just discovered it myself after years of using Google and Adwords, I thought I'd share it here for anybody in the same boat.)

Ok, so a natural part of niche research and keyword analysis and all that is to go to Google, type in your keyword, and count the ads at the top and down the right hand side. The more ads you see, the common wisdom goes, the more people are advertising on that keyword so the more profitable it must be, right?

Problem for me: Whenever I went over to Google and tried to do this, I would get NO ads whatsoever. For any keyword. Just empty space on the right. If I was lucky sometimes maybe one ad would show up.

Of course after a little bit of confusion I quickly realized what was happening: I'm in Venezuela, a country that nobody is targetting ads on. Easily solved, I thought! I just changed the URL I was going into from "google.co.ve" to "google.com" and I was automatically in the US version of Google, and would get my ads, right?

Wrong.

Google is smart. It knows where you are and targets you properly no matter what domain you are on. After a round of going to google.co.uk, google.com.au, and many others and getting the same results, I gave up. I figured I would have to do without this particular technique.

But lo and behold... there IS a way to look at real Adwords results as if you were in the US, or anywhere you would like to be. Simply do the following:

1) Go here: https://adwords.google.com/select/Ad...ingPreviewTool

2) Fill out the keyword, language, and region you'd like to see

3) Press preview ads

And tada, you're looking at the actual results page from whichever area you chose Screenshot included of me seeing US ads, in spite of my actual location.

Hope this helps some of my fellow non-US-resident marketers with their own Adwords activities.

[Lucid]

The added advantage is that impressions are not counted in this tool. I'm sure lots of people "check" their ads or even their organic rankings many times a day. When you do that in the regular search engine, impressions are counted towards your ad which can negatively affect it (one impression, no clicks, CTR goes down). Also, Google is smart and can stop showing ads if you don't click on them figuring you are not interested in them. So it tries other ads and rotates them depending on inventory which means you may not see your own ad at times. This tool removes that potential barrier.