Choosing a market

A market is a country and a language, and it is the pair every call about a project asks in. A keyword has a different search volume, a different cost per click and a different set of results in each one, so there is no such thing as a ranking without a market attached to it.

Why the default is worth changing

The default is the United States in English. That is a real choice rather than an absence of one, so a shop selling in Serbia and asking in American English gets an honest, empty answer to a question nobody meant to ask. Set the market when you create the project, and the figures are about the place you actually sell in.

Changing it clears the worklist

A project’s market can be changed afterwards, on its Settings screen, and doing so clears that project’s opportunity worklist. The screen says how many rows will go before the button is pressed, counting the ones you marked done and the ones you dismissed as well as the open ones, because the dismissed ones are the work you will miss.

The argument for emptying it rather than leaving it: a worklist is keyed by the project and the keyword rather than by the run that produced it, which is exactly what lets you work through it over weeks while the numbers refresh underneath your own marks. Keep the old country’s rows and you have a list that is half one market and half another, with nothing on the row to say which. A stale answer is recoverable; two different questions mixed together is not.

Nothing else is thrown away. The project, its tracked keywords, its crawls and its runs already recorded keep the market they were asked in, so last month’s run stays readable and says which country its numbers came from.

And it waits for a run that is still going

The change is refused while that project has a run in flight, and the screen asks you to let the run finish first. The reason is specific: building the worklist does not look at the market, so a run that started in the old country and finished after the clear would refill the emptied list with the old country’s rows under a project that is now somewhere else.