Five Ways To Revolutionize Your Ad Text With Google’s New Location Ad Customizers

Specificity is a great thing, but it’s difficult to be specific in your AdWords ads for thousands of different people. Until now.

Google (my employer) recently updated an already very cool feature by allowing ad customizers based on target location. It’s a great update with lots of upside for advertisers of all sizes.

I want to talk about three things today:

• Deciding if ad customizers are right for you.
• New strategies to deploy with the recently released location ad customizer.
• Some reminders about how AdWords determines location.

Are Ad Customizers Right For You?

When this new feature was released about a year ago, a lot of people were excited about connecting with their customers at scale. Through one single ad, you could create hundreds of different variations of that ad that would be specifically customized for that user’s search. It was awesome, and the results have been pretty great, from everything I’ve seen and read.

So why wouldn’t you want to use customizers? If there aren’t any dynamic elements to what you offer, then you might be fine with standard text. Maybe you only have one specific product, and its price is stable.

Or perhaps you’re too busy. You might not want to bother with your Business Data in AdWords (If you’re reading Search Engine Land, I imagine that isn’t the case). There’s a bit of a setup process, which might be more than you want to deal with.

With that said, location matters, and acknowledging location through your ad text to relate to a user can be a big win for your ad text and your account overall. I definitely think it’s worth the effort of setting these ads up.

Five Strategies To Take Full Advantage Of Location Ad Customizers

As is the case with any type of ad customizer, if a user meets a criterion you’ve specified, your ad text can be updated accordingly. Here’s how you could take advantage of a user’s location.

1. Shipping Times

If you’ve ever worked at a company that does a lot of shipping, maps like the one below must be familiar:

Image from UPS.com site.

Shoppers within two days of your warehouse could benefit from seeing what their average delivery time would be. Maybe, due to changes from your competition, your offer of free shipping doesn’t stand out as much as it used to.

Now, you could offer free delivery within two days to Salt Lake City in your Google search ad — something you were already offering, only you couldn’t say it in an ad. It’s a much more enticing (and specific) offer.

Then, in your description line (or even headline, if you have the room), you can mention that delivery time. “Order today, at your door {=Feed.DeliveryTime}.” Of course, when implementing this, you’d probably want to schedule these smartly, as well. You don’t want to promise delivery in two days if it’s Sunday in two days. We’ll talk about scheduling in a different example.

Here’s another thing to consider: Even if you don’t have specialized shipping or delivery times, you might still get an edge on the competition by mentioning a user’s specific state.

You’ve always offered free shipping anywhere in the US, but you could be surprised by what happens when you offer free shipping to Tennessee. Now, with location ad customizers, you can have a more targeted conversation with prospective customers.

2. Mentioning The User’s Location In Your Ad Text

If a user is searching for jobs, housing or anything else where geography is particularly important, you can insert their location into your ad text dynamically. You no longer have to create different campaigns geo-targeted to each of these areas if you want to customize ad text. Now, you can use location ad customizers and save yourself work.

Then, with a couple of placeholders, you can be specific for that many more people. “Browse Our {=Feed.ActiveJobListings} Jobs for {=Feed.Location}.”

3. Address, Hours & Offers From Your Nearest Location

If you’re already seeing success with location extensions, you can double down on that by adding the address and hours of the nearest location to your ad text. You can even go a step farther and add offers that are specific to those nearby locations. By scheduling your customizers, you can update your closing time or offers depending on the day of the week.

 
A line of ad text as simple as “Book a table until {=Feed.Hours} today” can make your ad lead to a concrete decision in someone’s mind.

4. Cost Of Service For A User’s City

A common refrain throughout this post is that location matters. That might be most apparent when it comes to pricing that differs by regions. Before location ad customizers, you had two options to deal with price: break out separate geo-specific campaigns that mention price in ads, or omit price entirely from your ad text.

That’s no longer the case. You can include dynamic pricing in your ads that matches to your users. If you’re competitive on pricing, you should trumpet that. Even if you aren’t competitive on pricing, you could still mention it to pre-qualify your clicks and increase your conversion rate.

 
Then you can have a line of text that says something like, “Starting at {=Feed.Price} per month!” Including pricing in your ad text can be a good thing, and it can also be a bad thing.

It’s a good idea to understand how important pricing is to your prospective customers before deciding whether or not to include this. Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.

5. Updated Inventory Numbers For Nearest Location

At Google, we’ve been talking about micro-moments a lot lately, and a particularly powerful micro-moment is when you really need to buy something right now. I mean, they make entire movies about this stuff.

It’ll take some extra diligence when updating your Business Data (as you don’t want to give out incorrect info), but it can really pay off. If someone has an I-want-to-buy-RIGHT-NOW moment, you want to be there for them and be able to fulfill their needs. Local inventory ads can do this for your Shopping Campaigns, and now your text ads can offer similar benefits.

How AdWords Determines Location

My sincere hope is that you’re now 100 percent convinced that location ad customizers can be as revolutionary as I think they can be. Now, as you plan your glorious geo-specific, yet scalable, ad tests, there are a couple of things to keep in mind about how AdWords determines a user’s location. You don’t have to do anything to actively manage this, but I think this is good to know as you analyze performance of ad customizers.

A user’s location can be determined by physical location or location of interest. Location ad customizers use both of these when determining someone’s location, but location of interest trumps physical location. Their intent matters more than where they may happen to be when searching.

Your ad text and results might be influenced by the different ways that location can be measured. Be sure to keep that in mind, especially because geography can (and should) be an important part of your ad text strategy.

Conclusion

If you haven’t started using ad customizers yet, now is definitely the time. Location ad customizers have joined the ranks of the must-test, along with countdown ads.

Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.

About The Author

Matt Lawson

Matt Lawson is Vice President of Ads Marketing for Google, responsible for a broad portfolio of ads products including search, shopping, display, and analytics.