I attended an Advanced AdWords seminar last week and am revisiting the topic of Building National Ads for Local Needs .
This seminar was sponsored by Google and lead by Brad Geddes of BG theory . While most of the Advanced Class was more a refresher than anything new, it has prompted me to make a change in my national campaign strategy for local business. In addition to the negative terms I use (listed in the original article), I now also use exclude cities, regions and metro areas in the campaigns Location settings. If your business is in Madison Alabama area, I would create local and national campaigns. In the national campaigns, I would exclude the areas covered in the local campaign and then add exclusions for all cities named Madison in the country (Google lists 24 all together).