Location Extensions Guidelines & Best Practices

Location Extensions Guidelines & Policies

Ads with location extensions must follow the AdWords advertising policies for standard text ads. They must also comply with special requirements for ads using this feature. You can view the full list of requirements within the AdWords Help Center:  

Location Extensions Best Practices

Best Practices Examples

These examples illustrate good use cases for this feature:

• A campaign advertising an antique store uses the store address.
• A campaign for a restaurant review website uses the address of one of the reviewed establishments.

These examples illustrate poor use cases for this feature:

• A restaurant website includes the address of its competitor.
• An online-only business includes a residential address.

Targeting ads with location extensions more effectively

As with any AdWords ad, the more relevant your keywords and ad text are, the more targeted your ad will be to users who may be interested in your business or service. Consider the tips below when creating ads that will appear with an address:

• Keywords: Location extensions attach address information to an existing ad, so you don't need to provide special keyword choices. However when choosing keywords, remember that users will often enter general locations for keywords to further narrow their search results. So if your keywords include meaningful terms like a street name, neighborhood, city, or region, your ad will be more likely to appear for a related user search. If your ad text also includes these terms it will also be more relevant and likely to earn user clicks, or a visit or phone call to your store.
• Ad Text: You aren't required to choose or write your ad text in a particular way, but ads with ad extensions may appear in context with a business address for a user or on an enhanced map. Try to write your ad text with this in mind.
  
  For example, if you sell antique furniture at a shop in a unique neighborhood of your city, or on a particularly well-known street, it may help to highlight this in your ad text to emphasize how local and accessible your business is. Users will see that your address actually matches your marketing message, and they'll be more likely to visit your antique shop in person. They may choose to click your URL to see more about what you sell on your website, call your store to ask a few questions about the products you sell, or arrive at your store ready to buy an item.
  
  Lastly, when using an ad extension with your text ad, for example, create a location extension to help make local users aware that your business is nearby. If you've got multiple business locations, create generic ad text that will suit all locations, so that users near to a given address will see an ad that makes sense to them.

Managing addresses for location extensions

It's important to think about how and when an address will appear for users. Here are some tips for setting up your address settings for ads with location extensions:

• If you want a particular ad to only appear with a particular address, and no others, you can choose this option at the ad level. This can help you more effectively target users near to a given business location.
• If you're a business owner, you can use addresses you've stored in Google Places. You can link your Google Places account at the campaign level.
• You can manually add individual addresses to your campaign with ad extensions. Use this option if you don't have a Google Places account and you're not a business owner.