Making local advertising easy: upgrade your local business ads to location extensions

Last year, we unveiled a new feature called location extensions for those of you who use online advertising to drive traffic to your brick and mortar locations. This feature allows you to include information such as your business name, address and phone number in your existing text ads. When a potential customer performs a search, their location or search terms are dynamically matched to your business locations, and your most relevant location appears within your ad on Google.com and Google Maps. 

Location extensions are the new and improved way to run local ads, so we’ll begin transitioning the local business ads in your AdWords account to ads that are compatible with location extensions soon. We wanted to give you plenty of time to get familiar with the new feature, so we thought we’d give you a heads up about the upcoming transition today. To learn more, please visit www.google.com/adwords/lbatransition. 

In order to make this as seamless as possible, we’re offering the following options to help you transition smoothly:

1. Upgrade your local business ads to text ads with location extensions. To take full advantage of the benefits of location extensions and ensure a seamless transition of your local business ads, we encourage you to update your ads through the five simple steps outlined on our website.

2. Automatically transition your local business ads. If you choose not to take any action, in the coming weeks, campaigns containing local business ads will be automatically enabled with location extensions using addresses from your local business ads. We’ll also replace your local business ads with new ads that are compatible with location extensions. While any of your addresses may now appear with the standard text ads in your campaign when relevant, each transitioned local business ad will continue to be linked to a single address and will only show to people near that address. 

We’ve heard from many of you who’ve already switched to location extensions that campaign management and attracting customers in your area is now simpler and more effective. With location extensions, you can deliver more exposure and local relevance by using the same ads for all your business locations without the overhead of maintaining a different ad for each location. Visit the location extension benefits page to learn about other ways it can help improve your campaigns.

We hope these changes help you reach more local customers with your ads, and value your feedback about this transition. Please share your comments or suggestions regarding the process using this form.

Posted by Emily Williams, Inside AdWords crew