I have started a Google Adwords campaign that is I’ve restricted to a radius of 120 miles of Chester as I’m not interested in work in the ‘deep’ south.
But, my IP address shows me as being in London presumably becuase my ISP is Demon who are based there, so when I enter ‘document imaging’ in Google my ad does not appear.
This has got me thinking that presumably this could be the case for other companies (i.e. they may be in my target area but their IP address puts them outside it). So should I just suck it up and allow my ad to display over the entire UK?

Make sure you are logged out of adwords before you try to look for your ad. Change your location in Google to Chester and it might help as well. Log out of google do your search as then change the location setting on the left hand side.

Couple of things that might work

But what about other companies? i.e. Company A based in my target area uses Demon as their ISP so their location (according to their IP address) appears as London, so my ad will not appear.
Changed ad to UK coverage for now but I’d be interested if there’s a solution to this.

What you know is that your advert will fairly definitely show to people that ARE in the right area. It depends on your budget of course; but while you might miss a few sales, you may also be likely to miss a lot more if the same money is spent on people in Scotland rather than those definitely in the right area.

Make sure you’ve got “Chester” in your keywords!

You’re slightly missing the point. If I go to the BBC web site it shows me the weather for London (until I change it) because my IP address originates there – so according to the internet this is where I am. This must be the same for everybody – their IP address may be no where near their actual location.
So targeting ads to specific locations may well miss a lot of people. Seems to be better to just target the whole of the UK or at least the country you’re interested in.

I can’t think of a time that my incorrect location has been reported as anything but London.
Have had London reported a good few times, but otherwise it’s been accurate to twenty miles or so.

So I’d be fairly confident that people seeing your ads would be in 120 miles of Chester.

Virgin and BT account for over half the broadband in the UK – both have local nodes AFAIK
Talk-Talk and Sky take about a third so if you can determine how they operate you should be able to figure out if you have a potential problem

That “default to London” thing with the BBC has nothing to do with your IP address. It’s just that the Beeb don’t really give a toss for anyone outside the M25.

Surely if you’re offering a nationwide service, as you are, nationwide coverage would also be a good idea, no?
Is the business a local business like a taxi service, or is it something where you can quite easily service a customer who is 200 miles away?

my IP address shows me as being in London

What are you using to tell you that?

so when I enter ‘document imaging’ in Google my ad does not appear

are you getting any ads? If so maybe it’s your ad that is the problem not your IP address.

The IP details that Google and the like use is far more detailed than just where your ISP is based. If you look at Google analytics for your site you will be able to drill down to city and in some case IP can even go down to street level. Do you ever see ads for online dating that say “meet people in Bristol”. This is using the IP of your computer to know where you are.

The best thing is to have Chester in your keywords, Chester in the meta data of your webpages and Chester in H1 and H2 tags of your webpages. If Google ads are then setup for a specific location then you should be alright. Testing adwords is always slightly hard as then never show to everyone unless you have some massive campaign that is buying all the ad save or you are very very niche.

What you could do to prove things are working is let the ads run for a week or so and then use Google analytics to see where people are looking at your website from. If they are not motley clustered around Chester then I guess you have a problem.

It is all a bit of minefield that I am not 100% sure about, not sure anyone is.

Cheers for that info Woody, I’ll check that those tags are included.

It is all a bit of minefield that I am not 100% sure about, not sure anyone is.

You may have a point there!

sharkbait – it’s true that many ISPs make your internet connection ‘appear’ to be somewhere else – i.e. You down in London, me (in London) appearing down in Southampton…

… and the latter was the reason for me being unfairly dismissed from employers… who then gave me a hefty paycheck to go quietly after they realised they seriously f-cked up! My (then) boss promptly got sacked too…