Google have recently announced their new feature called Ad extensions which will enhance your PPC campaign for local searches. The extension will expand the standard text ad with additional business information such as your location, this will help website users easily find out more about your business and if you are truly local to them. In addition to this the additional information may also appear on Google and its properties such as Google Maps in an enhanced form.

You will be charged in the same way as normal for your PPC campaign, but if your ads are shown on Google maps you won’t be charged for clicks on the ad that expand your information window – but will if they click through to your website. If you provide more than one address, Google is clever enough to know to show your ad based on the choice of search terms or  if the user is geographically near to you – clever eh!

To add a location extension to an existing campaign is fairly easy, you can either link your local business centre account to your adwords account, or if you don’t have one of these (and you really should, we keep telling you too) then you can manually enter the address into the listing on the your adwords admin console. The newest enhancement to this feature is the ability to upload a custom icon that will appear on Google Maps. This will allow your Google Maps listing to stand out from your competitors and hopefully encourage that phone to ring.

If you’re running a PPC Campaign and your customers are local then this really is too good an opportunity to leave on the table…. Log in to your adwords campaign now and get locally targeting!