Get local in time for the holidays and beyond

(cross-posted on the Inside AdWords Blog and Mobile Ads Blog)


This holiday season, make it easy for your customers to find, visit, and call your business with AdWords location targeting and location extensions. Location targeting shows your ads to customers in specific geographic areas you want to reach, while location extensions dynamically attach your business address and phone number to your ads. Today, we are announcing a few improvements to these two features and making them available in more countries to help your business “get local” for the holidays.

What’s new:

1. Introducing airport targeting: A new way to reach travelers on the go
Whether people are checking a flight status or passing time before take-off, mobile and tablet devices have become indispensable for airport-goers. With the launch of airport targeting, businesses are now able to connect with potential customers on mobile, tablet or laptop devices in more than 350 airports around the world via AdWords.

With airport targeting, you can offer relevant, last-minute travel and entertainment opportunities, promote your mobile application to airport travelers, amplify interest in your in-airport campaigns, build your brands with mobile display ads, and much more. Plus, you can easily review the performance of these campaigns using geographic performance reports.

2. Location extensions and sitelinks show together
Location extensions can now be shown alongside one-line sitelinks in text ads (on desktop and laptop computers) and will continue to show with two-line and three-line sitelinks. If you have a multi-channel business, consider using location extensions in addition to sitelinks to help you highlight specific areas of your business.

3. Larger, more useful maps
Location extensions on desktop and laptop computers will now appear with a larger, more engaging map panel that will replace the current expandable map. When the location extension address is clicked, this new map panel appears to the right of the top search results.

Early testing suggests that users will click to see locations on a map more frequently than with our previous design.

4. Better location matching for customers
Features such as postal code targeting in the U.S., have enabled us to show closer and more relevant locations to your customers from within your location extensions. At the same time, if you have a specialty or destination business such as a niche boutique or a ski resort, your location extensions can be shown to people who are located nearby, but who aren’t within your business’s postal code -- so you also can attract customers who are willing to travel longer distances to visit your business.

5. Online conversion reporting for Location Extensions
If you use AdWords conversion tracking, you probably want to know how location extensions affect your online conversion rates. Earlier this year, we included online conversion data within ad extensions reports to help you analyze the overall impact of location extensions on online conversions and measure your online conversions per location more effectively.

6. Geo-targeting and location extensions available in more countries
In addition to previously announced updates to location extensions and geo-targeting options in more countries, we’re excited to make location extensions available in Argentina, Bulgaria, Romania, Russia, UAE, and Vietnam.

We have also expanded geo-targeting options in the following countries: counties in the United Kingdom, departments in France, and cities in Argentina, Russia, and United Arab Emirates.

Here’s a full list of location targets available globally.

Get local

We hope these improvements will make it easier for you to highlight your local business information for customers, both during and after this busy holiday season. If you’re new to local ads, or would just like to learn more, check out our help center for step-by-step instructions on setting up location extensions and location targeting. And, you can always contact AdWords support.

Posted by Smita Hashim, Group Product Manager