Like many businesses leveraging search advertising, you may be trying to reach customers beyond your physical location. Perhaps this means reaching a neighboring city, or maybe there's another state or even country to which you can ship your products. As you probably know, location targeting options give you the power to reach customers in just those places where you want to promote your business.

However, since you're not in the next city over, or that other state or country, you've been unable to see your locally targeted ads--until now. We've heard your feedback and now have a tool for you to use to preview your ads no matter where they're targeted. Here's how it works:
  1. Visit www.google.com/adpreview
  2. Enter your keyword(s) in the search box and click on the "Search" button
  3. Preview your ads on the search results page that loads or the subsequent pages (click the next link to see more ads on the right-hand side)
The search results and ads are not active, so you can preview at will without accruing impressions or accidental clicks. Best of all, you can refine the results page by adding location attributes and values manually to the URL of the ad preview page. Optional attributes include a target country, longitude/latitude coordinates, regions, and cities. In the U.S., you can also set a target ZIP code or designated market area (DMA).

For example, if you are trying to preview ads for "camping tents" in Chicago, IL, the URL you would use would look like:

http://www.google.com/search?adtest=on&hl=en&q=camping+tents&gr=US-IL&gcs=Chicago

Learn more about how you can preview ads and see what your customers in different geographies are seeing.

Posted by Vivian, Inside AdWords crew