San Francisco — Search advertising giant Google Inc. last week unveiled a new AdWords feature called "Location Extensions," which blends more with local businesses enabling them to add their business address to their search ads.
According to Google, the location feature empowers local businesses to "extend" your AdWords campaigns by connecting your business address to your search ads. It can either be linked via Google’s Local Business Center or add it manually in AdWords.
"If you own a business, you can create extensions by linking an AdWords campaign to your Local Business Center (LBC) account," explains Emel Mutlu of Google’s Inside AdWords Crew. "If you are not the primary business owner of the locations you are advertising, you can manually enter addresses directly into AdWords."
AdWords will then include the address automatically. This feature is being rolled out, so if you do not have it right away, keep waiting, it is coming.
With the new feature, once you link your AdWords campaign to your Google business center account, Google will then dynamically pair a business’s locations to a user’s location or search terms and show the appropriate address with text ads. If Google cannot approximate the searcher’s address, then the ad will be shown without an address. You can turn off the dynamic feature and show a specific address with a particular ad, so that the address shown is not based on the searcher’s location.
"For example, a clothing brand that distributes to a number of different stores might want to associate their ads with various store locations through extensions, even though their official business address does not correspond to those addresses," Mutlu adds.
Ads can also be displayed with their related address extensions on Google and Google Maps, including the regular text ads without the extensions on partner sites in the Search and Content Networks.
According to Google, local business ads in AdWords would not have a separate ad format. Existing ads will continue to function as they have until they are edited. Once it has been edited, they will be changed to the traditional text ad. It will look the same when published and it will appear in the same places, but the format will just be different.
Fully functional location extensions will be available soon in the coming weeks. Some advertisers are already enjoying the access to this feature. Local business ads will no longer be a separate format. Advertisers who already have local business ads, however, will be happy to know that their ads will continue to run as long as they are not edited.
The move is all part of Google’s strategy to break up the online local advertising market, which continually poses a challenge and opportunity for all the big Web companies. (Local is one of the five new areas of focus of AOL as well under new CEO Tim Armstrong).
More information about the local extensions can be found here.
Take a short tour of Google Local Business Center in Action: