Google continues to forge the way in PPC, leaving its competitors to play catch up again.

With all 435 United States Congressional Seats up for election Google is following the money in this race.

Google AdWords has added a solution to allow targeting of not only specific zip codes, but of actual Congressional Districts.  This is great news for anyone involved in political campaigning, or anyone else marketing to these districts.

Congressional Districts don’t necessarily follow other areas like area codes, municipal boundaries and zip codes so up until now, targeting them specifically purchasing TV, radio, or even PPC has been a challenge, if not impossible. The Google AdWords Blog has the details of how to enable this for your marketing purposes. Google has also prepared a toolkit called “Four Screens to Victory” to help you out.

Now as a SMB you can take advantage of directly marketing your own products to supporters of the candidates.  For example as a t-shirt vendor, you can target each of your ads specifically to each district, with the landing page correctly targeted in the ad as well.  It makes supplying the demand that much easier, and presumably will increase your conversions.

We think it will also make lobbying and other grass roots campaigns targeted at individual constituencies that much easier as well. Imagine that your non-profit organization wants to sway a politician in a certain direction. This new targeting functionality will make advertising to your stakeholders much easier.

It’s great that Google is thinking about these unique targeting initiatives, and hope that they continue to refine the targeting parameters moving ahead.

What do you think?