AdWords Location Extensions & Google My Business

Extensions in AdWords – particularly, IMO, Locations, are essential to improving the performance of the campaigns – they give your ads more real estate, they make it easier for mobile users to contact you and they’re free.

Google Places have lately been superseded with Google My Business – it’s okay this is a Google thing, they like to change the name of a product, this then enables the company to have a public Google+ profile.

If you use an AdWords MCC account then you have all your AdWords accounts under one umbrella – this makes it easy to keep your eye on all of your clients’ accounts without endlessly logging in to separate accounts.



Likewise you’ll most likely be an Administrator with your clients Google Analytics accounts – this is important when it comes to linking up the AdWords Extensions.

Here I’ll only deal with the Extension Locations, because these been a little tricky of late – this was proved to me by a call to the AdWords team and they didn't know why certain Locations had been deleted within a campaign.

So to set-up these Locations you need to firstly click on the Extension tab, then click on the red + Extension button, that’s this one:

After clicking you should then get something like this:

Simply click the blue Done button; you’ll be taken back to AdWords and will see this:

You now need to do the same for the campaign extension, because all we've done so far is set-up an account extension.

One thing to doubly ensure here is that your My Business page does serve customers at the business address:

If it doesn't - forget it you can't use the Locations extension.

Now because you may have quite a few Google My Business pages – you want to ensure Google associate the right campaign with the right My Business page, so you need to click on Filter to add the business name of the company, it’ll look like this:

Of course were I'm leaving blanks you will see your email account associated with your Google My Business and naturally the name of the business being associated – one really important thing here is to ensure you use the exact same name of the company’s My Business account, this is also really helpful if one of your clients has a multitude of My Business pages and a multitude of AdWord campaigns to run with each individual page.

Okay, we've also got to do the same for Ad group extension; this is all pretty quickly done as drop down boxes mean it’s just a matter of clicks to add all the Ad groups you wish to include in the Location.

Once the syncing process - Google states can take up to 24 hours, is completed keep a close eye on each campaign to ensure there have been no tiny errors which either hinder or simply stop the extension from working.

That’s it…