This guide will show you how to set up a global or multi-national campaign in Google Ads for compatibility with WeatherAds. You may wish to create global or multi-national campaigns in Google Ads if you are advertising to a remarketing list, or if you are targeting a group of countries that share a common language or culture.

The main challenge here is that Google Ads places a limit of 10,000 cities per campaign, meaning that WeatherAds can only weather target campaigns covering a geo spread of less than 10,000 cities.

This means that if your Google Ads campaign is targeting 'all countries and territories', (or if it is targeting a large number of countries) you won’t be able to make your ads weather responsive through WeatherAds. In this case, the recommended workaround is to split your campaign up into two or more campaigns, each targeting a territory that, when broken down into child geos, will result in less than 10,000 child geos per campaign. This guide will outline how to do this.

Setting Up your Global or Multi-national Campaign in Google Ads

1. When setting up a campaign in Google Ads, the default geo targeting setting is ‘all countries and territories’. This must be manually changed to at least 1 geo target (country, city, region, zip/ postal code etc)

2. If you plan on running a global campaign, or one that covers a large number of countries in Google Ads, the best method is to do create a handful of smaller campaigns, splitting them up evenly to contain less than 10,000 cities per campaign.

3. Use the chart below to calculate how many cities Google recognizes per country. Then add each country individually to be geo targeted for your campaign, until you get close to 10,000.

NOTE: WeatherAds automatically breaks down large territories into smaller, 'child' geos within your Google Ads location targeting settings. If you are targeting a country, in most cases the default breakdown is to city level geo targets (the exception being USA).

4. Create a new campaign and add the remaining countries in.

5. In WeatherAds, use the Multi Location Flow to create a new automation for your Google Ads campaigns.

Targeting the USA

When weather targeting the USA with a Mult-Location Automation flow, WeatherAds automatically defaults to county-level targeting rather than city level. This is because the amount of cities in the USA exceeds 10,000 (16,325). In doing so, WeatherAds makes it easy for marketers to create nation-wide US campaigns.

In most cases this does not compromise the accuracy of the weather targeting because most of the points of weather data are collected in the mostly densely populated areas (major cities) within each county. Therefor you are still effectively targeting at the city level in most cases.

If you wish to create a hyper-granular campaign for the USA, using city-level weather data, then you must manually input all the US states that you want to target using the geo-targeting in Google Ads.

WeatherAds will then revert to using city based weather data, providing your campaign covers less than 10,000 cities. If the total number of cities in your campaign exceeds 10,000, you will need to split the states up between 2 separate campaigns. Please reference the table below to understand the total number of cities for each US state:

For more in-depth instructions on weather targeting the USA, Australia or Canada, please see this guide.