Google Data

We’re excited to introduce upgraded location extensions, a better way to display your business locations in every ad by linking your Google My Business and AdWords accounts.

Consumers increasingly look online for information such as driving directions, store hours, and products and services available at local businesses. Research shows that 50% of consumers visit a store within one day of searching for local information on their smartphones.
As people are likely to visit a store based on what they see in online search, it’s important to capture every opportunity to showcase your locations. Newly upgraded location extensions allow you to feature your store locations in all campaigns so that every ad can deliver the most relevant local information at the moments that matter.

Many of you already include local business information using campaign-level location extensions in ads on Google Search and Maps. Now there’s a faster, better way to do this at the account level. You can manage all of your business addresses using Google My Business (formerly Google Places for Business). Then, link your Google My Business and AdWords accounts to automatically display relevant business location information in all of your AdWords campaigns.

“Account level location extensions save us hours of time managing large accounts. Adding store locations to a single Google My Business account then linking them to AdWords means we don't have to spend time manually updating addresses in each individual campaign while still maintaining accuracy. Every minute saved is more time that we can spend improving performance.”

Key Benefits

Scale and reach. The new Google My Business makes it easy to manage your business listings on Google and link them to AdWords. Previously, location extensions needed to be set up for each campaign. Now you can set up upgraded location extensions at the account level and they’ll automatically be enabled for all campaigns in your AdWords account.

Easier optimization. The business addresses you link to your AdWords account can also be used for location targeting and bid adjustments. For example: you can target ads to the United States, then bid +80% for the area within 4 miles of all the business locations that you’ve linked in a single step.

Getting Started

1. Create your Google My Business account and add your business locations.
If you’re the owner of a business with physical locations and aren’t using Google My Business yet, you can sign up for free. Google My Business makes it easy to connect with your customers, keep your business information up-to-date, add photos, and more.

2. Link your Google My Business account to AdWords.
Linking your accounts in one easy step allows your business info to appear with your ads. All campaigns will have location extensions automatically enabled when you link your accounts. You’ll also be able to customize your upgraded location extensions for different devices. Learn more
This change is part of our broader effort to help you better reach customers as more people search for locally relevant content while on the go. We’ll continue to improve account location extensions with the goal of upgrading all AdWords accounts over the next few months.

You can learn more about upgraded location extensions in our help center.

Posted by Aileen Tang, Senior Product Manager, Local Ads