Location Extensions - the new way to run local ads

Thursday, August 20, 2009 | 11:00 AM

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We recently announced a new way to run local ads in the new AdWords interface – location extensions. Location extensions allow you to "extend" your AdWords campaigns by dynamically attaching relevant business addresses to your ads.

If you're a primary business owner, you can set up extensions by linking an AdWords campaign to your Local Business Center (LBC) account. If you're not the primary business owner of the locations you're advertising, you can manually enter addresses directly into AdWords. 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 doesn't correspond to those addresses.

Once extensions are set up, Google will dynamically match your locations to the user's location or search terms and show relevant addresses with your text ads. If we're unable to determine a user's location or if there are no relevant addresses to show, we'll simply show your ad without an address. If you don't want to dynamically match addresses to your ads and prefer to choose one particular address to show with one particular ad, you can do so by setting up specific location extensions for individual ads. Your ads can show on Google and Google Maps with their relevant extensions and as regular text ads on search and content partner sites.

With the introduction of location extensions, local business ads will no longer be available as a separate ad format. You can create new local ads from scratch or by adding extensions to your existing text ads. Your existing local business ads will continue running as long as you don't edit them. If you edit a local business ad, it will be converted to a text ad with the ad's address attached as a location extension. The new converted ad will look identical to the local business ad and will appear in the same places that your local business ads used to appear. AdWords Editor will continue to support the creation and management of local business ads, and we plan to launch Editor support for location extensions in a future release. For full details about editing local business ads in the new interface, visit the Help Centre.

Location extensions are available in Australia and New Zealand and will be rolled out to other countries when possible. To learn more about location extensions, read the location extensions overview section of the Help Centre.

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