New AdWords Features Bolster Local Advertising
If your site or blog targets local customers, a slew of features included in Google’s new AdWords release should make your life a whole lot easier. According to the Google Inside AdWords Blog, AdWords users will now be able to specifically target over 30,000 ZIP codes in order to reach out to potential customers.
The new Google AdWords feature will allow the addition of up to 1,000 ZIP codes per batch. Perhaps best of all, users will be able to analyze performance stats according to ZIP code, allowing you to see which of your markets are most deserving of attention.
Even more exciting for some AdWords users is Location Insertion, a new feature that will allow you to create a single ad that will automatically incorporate the appropriate local information depending on where it’s being displayed. This will save you the hassle of manually editing your ads hundreds of times to make them location-specific.
More on Location Insertion
After you create an ad and run it through Location Insertion, AdWords will automatically insert the appropriate text, such as:
- Phone number
- Postal code
- City name
These parameters can be hot-inserted into not only the actual content of the ad, but the destination URL, display URL and ad title as well. Location Insertion will continue to work even if your location extensions are overridden by other extensions. However, location extensions must be enabled and running for Location Insertion to work properly.
Helpful Changes for Travel Advertisers
Another change will affect Google’s advanced location targeting. Based on the feedback of travel advertisers, queries for a destination such as “flight to Hawaii” will now generate ads for the user’s original location as well as their destination. In other words, a user based in Chicago would receive ads pertinent to both Chicago and Hawaii travel sites, for example.
In another change, Google will now use webpage content in addition to the current physical location of the user in order to present local ads. For example, a person in Michigan looking at pages about New York City would receive local ads pertaining to both Michigan and New York.
Additional details regarding these changes and others can be found in a separate post within the Google Inside AdWords Blog.