Today we’re kicking off a partnership with GroupM Next, the innovation unit of GroupM, called Spark, a series of custom, co-programmed events focused on delivering unique education and innovation experiences for  brands – specifically, clients of GroupM media agencies. We created this initiative together to cultivate education and dialogue for verticals that are under-represented in the broader digital media space in terms of data, research and opportunity. This partnership is the first of its kind for both Google and GroupM, in that it’s a series dedicated to client-focused education and is designed to address topics that directly impact brand opportunity and performance.

The first event, Spark: CPG, is taking place this afternoon in New York with nine leading CPG companies in attendance. In addition to discussions led by Google and GroupM Next execs, Kantar, Buzzfeed and Amazon are joining us as we, collectively as marketers, share insights, research and digital opportunities brands in the consumer packaged goods category can take advantage of.

A quick rundown of discussions on the docket at Spark: CPG in the context of marketing for CPG brands includes:

»      Making the web work for CPG brands – our take on how the consumer, and world around us, has changed

»      The digital enhanced path, exploring the ever-changing connection between consumers and brands and opportunities that exist through understanding new consumer behaviors and the role of technology

»      Marketing and messaging innovation across multiple screens

»      The power of video and building brands with the power of sight, sound and motion

»      Developing ‘content gifts’ in the social world and capturing opportunities by engaging your brand’s super sharers

»      How mobile commerce can connect shoppers to the places and CPG products they love

»      Fostering fluid innovation across marketing and process to enable agencies and brands to meet the pace of change in consumer dynamics and technology

In most cases, Spark will provide brands with insights and education they wouldn’t have access to elsewhere. Additionally, through ongoing collaboration between our companies, GroupM agencies and clients, we’ll identify areas of interest and need for brands across digital media, and foster opportunities as they emerge.

Over the past 30 years, California Closet Company has grown from the brainchild of a college student organizing his dorm room closet to a successful business with more than 77 franchise locations. To reach customers across the U.S. and internationally, the company centered their digital marketing strategy on creating locally relevant campaigns.

It’s no surprise that local campaigns are a focus for many businesses--from finding directions to looking up a phone number, more people are going online to find local information. In fact, more than 20% of searches on Google are related to location, and people often act quickly on local searches. Research shows that using smartphones, 88% of people who search for local information take action within a day.

To help you organize your local ad campaigns this spring, we’re introducing three new features in AdWords to help you create ads that are more relevant to local customers.

If you customize your direct mail, outdoor ads, or newspaper ads at a postal code level, you now can easily do the same in AdWords in the US. We are introducing the ability to target more than 30,000 US ZIP Codes with your AdWords campaigns.

You will be able to add up to 1,000 postal codes at a time to your search ad campaigns with AdWords Location Targeting. Plus, you can get feedback on the performance of your local campaigns by viewing campaign performance statistics at the postal code level.

"Location targeting within AdWords helped us double lead volume and cut the cost to acquire new customers in half,” said Lois Erbay, Director of Marketing, California Closet Company. “We plan on building on that success by using ZIP Code targeting to create even more locally relevant campaigns for our customers.”

To help you easily create a custom ad title, text, display URL, and/or destination URL for all of your locations at scale, we’ve developed location insertion for location extensions. You’ll no longer need to create multiple ads for multiple locations--this new feature automatically inserts the city, phone number, or zip code of your local business into your ad text.

For example, if your ad text says: “Find a {lb.city:Local} Store or Shop Online,” a user viewing your ad in Chicago would see: “Find a Chicago Store or Shop Online.” This new feature cuts out all the work to building out ad text featuring local information for all your locations.

“We’ve had amazing success manually customizing our creative with local information for our top markets, which shows us that customers want locally-relevant results when it comes to a service like storage,” said Chris Laczi, Advertising Director, Uncle Bob's Self Storage. “That’s why we’re very excited about location insertion. It will simplify the task of creating locally customized ads for our 400+ locations, and we expect it will greatly enhance conversion rate of our ads.”

You must have location extensions set up and running in order to enable location insertion. Location insertion will work even if your location extensions don’t show because of other extensions. We detect location based on where your customer is physically located or by the geographic locations she may have shown interest in.

Find out more about location insertion and location extensions.

When we launched advanced location targeting in March 2011, we provided you with more control over how you geographically target your ads. Based on advertiser feedback, we’re implementing four additional enhancements that will make location targeting options clearer and more powerful. Read more about these enhancements in the Help Center and in this blog post.

There is significant opportunity for businesses to reach local customers online and win moments that matter by delivering the right ad in the right context. Stay tuned for more information on how ZIP Code targeting can help you grow your business.

We want to hear from you about your success in getting local with AdWords--share your story here and we might reach out to you to participate in our upcoming blog posts.

Posted by Richard Holden, Product Management Director

First, we’ve reworded the options to help make them clearer. Here is what the options for advanced location targeting used to look like:

Here is what we’re unveiling today:

Previously, if you had selected “Target using physical location,” your ad would show to people in your targeted location as long as they were not searching for something related to a different location. Now, when you select “People in my targeted location,” your ad shows to people in your targeted location, without exception.

Let’s say you are an airline using physical location targeting to reach customers in Atlanta, GA looking to fly to Hawaii. You have the keyword “flights to hawaii” in your ad group. Previously, your ad wouldn’t appear for any prospective customers in Atlanta that were searching for “flights to hawaii” because the search term indicated that they were interested in Hawaii. With the new setting “People in my targeted location,” the airline can now reach the customers in Atlanta searching for “flights to hawaii.”

This enhancement has been beneficial in increasing VEGAS.com’s ability to target offers to users based on where they are located at the time of the search. “As a leading destination travel site, our goal is to send the right message to a user as they plan their travel well ahead of time from their home market. Advanced Location Targeting has given us that ability,” said Dan Hippler, Vice-President of Marketing, Vegas.com.

Previously, the only location targeting signal applicable to ads on the Google Display Network was the likely physical location of the user. Now, both the location extracted from the content of the page and the likely physical location can be used, making advanced location targeting applicable for the Display Network for the first time. The default setting is to show to people “in” or “viewing pages about” your targeted location, but you can edit this option at any time.

Let’s say a customer in Atlanta is planning a trip to Hawaii and she’s looking at websites about fun things to do in Hawaii. A coffee plantation tour service from Hawaii would like to show ads about its offers to such a user. Similarly, an airline would like to advertise flight services to this user. The new targeting enhancements give the tour service and airline such capabilities, as both an ad targeted to Hawaii for a coffee plantation tour and an ad targeted to Atlanta for flights from Atlanta may now both show on the same page.

There are several situations in which we will not use location to target an ad. For example, a user reading about news in Hawaii may not be interested in “Hawaii tours”. For this reason, we currently only consider the location signal on a limited set of pages when we believe it may be useful. You can gain insight into the sites on which your ads are showing on the placement report, and into the locations on the geographic report.

Note that all campaigns targeting the Display Network will automatically be opted into the default option, which is to reach people in, searching for, or viewing pages about your targeted location. If you wish to exclude campaign traffic from people viewing pages about your location, you can choose “People in my targeted location” in advanced location options.

We have also changed the advanced location exclusion methods. Previously, the less restrictive option, “Exclude by physical location only,” was the default. Based on feedback from advertisers, we have re-worded the exclusion options and made the more restrictive option, “People in, searching for, or viewing pages about my excluded location,” the default. This way you avoid getting impressions for excluded areas regardless of whether your customers are located or interested in those areas.

What it looked like before:

What we’re launching today:

For example, now by default excluding Chicago means your ad won’t show for customers in Chicago or those outside Chicago who included “Chicago” in their searches.

This change will only impact newly created campaigns and will not affect existing campaigns.

Remember, advanced location targeting may limit the exposure of your ads, so it isn’t suited for all advertising goals.

To find out more about advanced location targeting or to change your settings, visit our help center. If you use AdWords Editor, details on how these changes will impact you can be found in the AdWords Editor help center.

Posted by Smita Hashim, Group Product Manager Local Ads

We’re now excited to share that Google Ads will be joining Google+ Pages to provide you, our advertising partners, with the latest Google advertising product news, training, tips and Hangouts that can help make the web work for you. We hope it will become a useful resource for growing your business, reaching customers in the moments that matter, and making smarter decisions.

Here’s a quick peek at what you can expect from the Google Ads page on Google+:

Add Google Ads to your circles here. We look forward to connecting with you on Google+.

Posted by: Christina Park and Katie Miller, Ads Product Marketing