For brick-and-mortar advertisers, it's more important than ever to claim and promote your business on Google Maps.
But cracking the code on how to deliver and control Google Maps ads can have felt like a moving target in recent months. With the Performance Max goal, Google Business Profile (GBP) guidelines, and changes to how people search for places, there's a lot going on within Maps.
Nevertheless, by optimizing your GBP listing, leveraging your location assets, and using Performance Max to align with your storefront and travel goals, you can effectively increase your business’s presence on the map.
Companies really need How do I target a map specifically?
Yes, the way people search for businesses and Google's shift in emphasis on the placement of maps within search results makes it essential to have a separate Google Maps strategy.
Simply pointing sitelinks to a “store locator” page and bidding on “nearby” keywords is no longer enough to get noticed by customers during search.
The future of search engine results pages (SERPs) will continue to change as the transition to AI-focused search results pages moves full speed ahead, especially as Performance Max continues to monopolize Google’s engineering resources.
Further AI changes are expected to be announced at Google Marketing Live this year, which may include the prevalence of maps in the user journey.
In Google's latest version, Maps results appear above ads in the Search Generative Experience (SGE) view, and as you know, this is expected to remain the standard as SERPs evolve.
For businesses to be truly successful, they need to claim their storefront within their Google Business Profile in order to get in front of users in the most natural format and promote it within Google Ads.
Creating and optimizing your business profile and data feed
Creating and optimizing your business profile is the first step to getting your footprint on Google Maps.
Keeping your store hours, phone numbers and important business information up to date is a crucial factor in your customer's decision-making process.
Your business' contact information, a link to your website, and obtaining and responding to reviews are also key to capturing customer attention (and conversions).
If you're a hotel, restaurant, or business with multiple locations, make sure your data feed is up to date and, if necessary, add accurate photos, menus, and other helpful visuals.
What type of campaign should you run?
When you're ready to promote your store, determine which campaign type will work best for your business. This will be a combination of search and best performing campaigns (using store or travel goals as your optimization type).
Campaigns should be structured by KPIs like all other campaign types and should not be split by location unless you have different goals per store/city or you need to set location groupings at the campaign level as needed.
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Campaign settings and geo-targeting
When you set up your campaign, make sure you have geo-targeting set up so you know where your customers are and where they might be searching.
If there are countries or cities you don't have a base in or don't want to prioritize, location exclusions are an important part of your setup.
If you did not add or exclude locations during the initial build, the locations report (Reports > New Report > Most Specific Location) to identify areas to focus on by increasing your budget or removing them from your campaign.
Places and Business Assets
Before you move on to anything else, make sure you've properly set up your location assets, which can be served across Google Search, search partners, the Display Network, and YouTube.
How you create location assets depends on whether you directly own the locations. For more information on how to set up location assets, see Google's support page.
Verifying your phone numbers and enabling call reporting is critical to the success of your location assets and measuring their performance.
If you have geographic KPIs you want to achieve, you should add location assets as ad extensions at the campaign level within your Google Ads account, otherwise you can add them at the account level so they apply to all your campaigns.
In addition to your location assets, make sure your business name and logo assets are up to date and applied at the account level as these will help improve your quality score and increase brand awareness with your customer base.
Maximize your local business visibility on Google Maps
Claiming and promoting your business on Google Maps can help boost your local visibility and drive more customers to your store. By following the steps above, you can quickly and effectively use Google Maps to grow your business.
As Google continues to embrace AI, we can expect to see more maps-first results in SERPs and add features to Google Ads to make the process for advertisers to advertise on maps quicker and easier.
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