Use Location Insertion in Your PPC Ads to Increase Exposure for Local Listings

Anne Garcia - April 16, 2012

Google AdWords recently announced that they added enhancements to their location targeting capabilities to make location targeting clearer and more powerful. Now, they are introducing location insertion for location extensions.

With Location Insertion, advertisers will no longer need to create multiple ads for multiple locations. Location insertion for location extensions automatically inserts the city, phone number or zip code of your location that matches the searcher’s geographic location into your text PPC ad.

To implement location insertion in your ads, you must have location extensions enabled in your campaign. To enable location extensions, go to the “Extensions” tab within AdWords. Under “View” select “Location Extensions.” You have the option to select a location from a Google Places account or manually enter an address.

Once location extensions are enabled, you will add a parameter to your ad text. When appropriate, Google will replace the parameter in your ad with the information that matches the location extension. Google detects location based on either where the searcher is physically located or geographic locations that they have been interested in.

You can use the parameters to dynamically replace the city name, postal code and phone number within your ad and can be inserted into your ad title, text, display and destination URLs.

Below is Google’s example ad that has been implemented with location insertion.