Make Your PPC More Local With Google's Local Business Ad Extensions

Google continues to give local companies great ways to use your "home field advantage" aka the fact that you're local. This time it's with Google's Local Business Ad Extensions in your AdWords ads. What is a Local Business Ad Extension? It's an extra line at the bottom of your AdWords ad that displays your business' street address. It appears directly below the URL in your AdWords ad.

Google AdWords is a great way to generate targeted traffic to your site in order to generate leads or sales. It also gives you a quick way to get on page one of the Google Search Engine Results Page for as many search keywords as you like.

Will this increase your ads' click throughs? It's too soon to tell but I would bet on YES! The Local Business Ad Extension is a feature that reinforces the local-ness of your ad to a searcher that has expressed a desire for local results. It also gives you a substantial differentiator from your competition and it makes your ad one more line longer than your competitions' ads. So it makes sense that it will increase click throughs for you.

So how do you add the Local Business Ad Extension to your ads to test it? If you have a Google Local Business Center account (and every local business should have one) you will have the option of linking your Local Business Center account to your AdWords account so the addresses can be dynamically inserted into those text ads depending on the search query. For businesses that don't have listings created in the LBC, AdWords provides an option to manually enter your address.

These ads will appear on the main page search results in addition to the maps.google.com page. So make sure you have your LBC account linked with your AdWords account, and keep an eye on your click through rates. You're probably going to see an increase in your click through rate if all other things are equal.

Google continues to deliver great advantages for the small businesses who are looking to grow by utilizing online marketing. This is a great new feature that all local companies should take advantage of. If you're unsure how to set this up or have questions about online marketing contact an online marketing professional.