Bid on Competitors Names or Products:

Trademark laws still have not been firmly set in this field. Google allows US and
Canadian advertisers to bid on trademark names of their competitors. The
competitors trademark names may not appear in the ad, but they can be used as the
ad trigger word. I can tell you from personal experience that these terms are often
super cheap and convert well.

If you use competitor names as the triggering word then you need to group that in
an ad that is not using dynamic keyword insertion or your ad title will put you in
trademark violation.

Keep in mind that since the laws are gray in this area you may run into some
problems if you push the envelope and do not respond to complaints. I believe in
the US trademark owners are required to inform you of the problem and give you a
chance to fix it before they have a chance to sue you for damages (whether or not
they can sue you is still somewhat up in the air).

I did this particular technique and ticked off about a dozen SEOs who made a few
hate threads. I primarily was looking for AdSense ad space in articles, but some of
the SEOs had nasty comments about the technique (although it is a rather common
technique).You may want to ask people before using their names if you think they may take it
the wrong way. Another good way to appear on many of the content sites is to run
your ads on phrase match for some of the more popular article titles in your
industry.

A way to avoid the controversy associated with bidding on competitors names is to
only bid on their names on content matched ads (ie: disable search ads in the ad
groups focused on competing products).

Viewing Geographically Targeted Ads:

Often people will target ads to a specific country. If you are not in the country you
will be advertising in you can view the country specific ads by adding &gl=country
code to the search string (ca for Canada, US for United States, UK for United
Kingdom, etc).

If Google is mixing in state regional ads it will list the state name at the bottom of
the ad.

Geotargeting can allow you to afford words which may be broader than your
globally effective keywords since they geotargeting only delivers ads to locations
you are interested in advertising at.

You may want to break your ads down by different price levels by country codes.
One of my friends nearly doubled his ROI by placing ads from low converting
countries in their own cheaper ad groups.