Whether consumers are looking for a great lounge to hang out with their friends or a trusty shop to repair a bicycle, the web is a great place to discover and learn about local businesses and services. Some of the listings on Google Maps showcase reviews to help prospective customers make informed decisions and find the places that are just right for them. Reviews on Google Maps are assembled from a variety of sources on the web to give you the best possible overview of what people are saying about a specific place. We also encourage users to share their opinions by writing reviews directly on the Place Page of any place they’ve visited, be it a local business, tourist attraction or the like.
If your clients are verified Google Places business owners, they can publicly respond to reviews written by Google Maps users on the Place Page for their business. Engaging with the people who have shared thoughts about their business is a great way to get to know their customers and find out more. Both positive and negative feedback can be good for a business and help it grow (even though it’s sometimes hard to hear). By responding, your clients can build stronger relationships with existing and prospective customers. For example, a thoughtful response acknowledging a problem and offering a solution can often turn a customer who had an initially negative experience into a raving supporter. A simple thank you or a personal message can further reinforce a positive experience. Ultimately, replying to reviews provides business owners the opportunity to learn what they do well, what they can do better, and show their customers they are listening.
Before writing a response, we recommend reading our handy tips on how to respond to reviewers. You can also follow these instructions. If your client has not yet verified ownership for their business on Google, please direct them to Google Places to claim their listing.
We announced this week that the Google Local Business Centre is now Google Places. This change was made to better connect Place Pages - the way businesses are being found today - with the tool that businesses use to manage their presence on Google.
Around the world, more than four million businesses have already claimed their Place Page on Google through the Local Business Centre, which lets them verify and supplement their business information to include things like hours of operation, photos, videos, product offerings, and more.
To help your clients keep track of how their business listing is performing on Google, we offer a personalised dashboard within Google Places that includes data about how many times people have found their business on Google, and which keywords they used to find it. The dashboard can help businesses make more informed decisions about how to be found on Google and interact with their customers.
We’re also announcing the beta stage of scheduled business photo shoots. In addition to uploading their own photos, businesses in Australia (Sydney, Melbourne, Perth, Adelaide and Brisbane) and Japan (Kyoto & Tokyo) can now request a free photo shoot of the interior of their business, which we'll use to supplement existing photos of businesses on Place Pages. We've been experimenting with this over the past few months, and now have created a site for businesses to learn more and express their interest in participating. Unfortunately, due to extremely high demand, our photographers will not be able to visit every business that applies. The good news, though, is that any business owner around the world can upload photographs to their Place Page by logging in to Google Places.
One out of five searches on Google are related to location, and we want to make sure that businesses are able to be found and put their best foot forward! To get started now, go to google.com/places.
We recently announced the launch of Place Pages - a Google Maps page of every location in the world, including, of course, businesses. Place Pages can include relevant photos, user reviews, directions, and contextually targeted ads.
We wanted to make targeting Place Pages as easy and clear as possible, so we've included them in AdWords placement performance reports. This data can help improve your clients' ROI by identifying potential areas of expansion. Take a look at this PDF to learn more about how to reach Google Maps users on the Google Display Network.
We recently launched Place Pages in Google Maps - Place Pages are pages with information for every place in the world, from landmarks to cities and everything in between, including, of course, businesses.
You can get to a Place Page by clicking on "more info" in search results, or by clicking "more info" in the mini-bubble on Google Maps. Now, instead of just getting a slightly bigger bubble, you'll get an entire page of details, like photos, videos, a Street View preview, nearby transit, reviews and related websites.
Here's a look at what you can discover about the Sydney Opera House using Place Pages. You have access to the address, local transit information, photos, user reviews, related web pages and more from a single place on Google Maps.
Your clients can make sure their Place Page information is accurate by updating their Local Business Center listings. If your clients need further instruction to add their businesses to the Local Business Center, the video below offers a quick overview of the process and advantages of adding or claiming their business listing. Even if you're already familiar with the Local Business Center, this video provides a helpful overview of the data you can access for your clients' listings such as impressions, top search queries, and where driving directions requests are coming from.
Posted by Kelly Blackford, Agency Training Team This is a partial cross post from the Agency Ad Solutions Blog
A few weeks ago, we introduced location extensions - a new way to run local ads in AdWords. Today, we wanted to tell you a bit more about location extensions and give you some best practices for setting them up in your account.
First, it's important to know that there are two ways to set up extensions. You can set up extensions at the campaign level or at the ad level.
Setting up campaign level extensions means that Google will dynamically match a campaign's text ads with the most relevant address in your account based on information like a user's location or a user's search terms. Keep in mind that the address will only be shown when it's relevant to the user's location or search terms. We'll use a fictional chain of coffee shops, Bob's Coffee, to illustrate when you'd want to add campaign level extensions.
Add campaign level extensions when you want to...
* Use the same ad text across a number of business locations. For example, Bob has a "buy one cup, get the second free" discount at all his coffee shops. Bob can create one ad and run campaign level extensions because his ad text for this discount is applicable to all his locations.
* Direct ads for all of your locations to the same landing page. For example, all of Bob's stores feature the same drinks and prices, so he has a single webpage to greet online users regardless of their location.
* Create and edit a lot of ads quickly. For example, Bob's Coffee is introducing a "$1 latte Tuesdays" promotion at all its stores. If Bob creates a new campaign for this promotion and sets up campaign extensions, he only has to create one ad, and that ad will be able to show with any of the addresses associated with that campaign.
Ad level extensions allow you to override a campaign's location extension settings. When you use ad level extensions, you are selecting one address to show with a specific ad.
Create ad level extensions when you want to...
* Associate a single address with a specific marketing message. For example, Bob wants to test out a promotion at just one location before implementing it for all stores. He is going to offer a "Case of the Mondays" special, a free upgrade to a large coffee when you a buy medium coffee on Monday. Bob has created an ad to go with this promotion and only wants this ad to show for the one location where he's running the promotion. He doesn't want AdWords to match the ad to any of his other addresses, so he overrides the campaign setting with an ad level extension.
* Direct each ad to a specific landing page. Bob has also created a separate landing page within his website to promote the "Case of the Mondays" promotion. He wants to direct most of his users to the main webpage via his regular campaigns, but wants to direct viewers of the "Case of the Mondays" ad to a page specifically for the promotion.
If ad level extensions better meet your needs, read more about how to start using them. Remember, you can use a mix of campaign and ad level extensions in your account.
Adding addresses to AdWords When you're setting up your extensions, you should also know that there are two ways to give your addresses to Google: use the Local Business Center or enter addresses manually into AdWords.
If you're a primary business owner, you should use Local Business Center to give your addresses to Google. The Local Business Center is a free tool that allows you to manage your business listings. Addresses you enter manually or through bulk upload here will affect how your free business listings and ads appear on Google.com and Google Maps. If you plan to use Local Business Center, you can learn more about how it works with extensions.
If you're not the primary business owner of the locations in your ads, you can manually enter addresses into AdWords. An example of a non-business owner might be a wireless hotspot company that provides Internet access at Bob's Coffee. The company doesn't own any of the Bob's Coffee locations, but might want to advertise that their Wi-Fi services are available at a Bob's Coffee location.
Whichever method you choose, you can add addresses from the same place in AdWords, in the Audience section of the Settings tab.
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.
