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Google Adds “Nearby Business” Mobile Ad Format For Location-Related Searches

Up to four paid business listings will display with direction and click-to-call links.

Ginny Marvin on May 21, 2015 at 4:40 pm

Google announced another addition to its lineup of mobile ad formats, Thursday, this time affecting location-based searches. The search engine will begin showing up to four ads for businesses on location-related searches in a “Nearby businesses” pack.

According to Google Trends data from March, “near me” searches have doubled in the past year, with 80 percent of those, not surprisingly, coming from mobile. With this change, the new nearby business ads are likely to show instead of traditional text ads. The ads will be driven by location extensions in AdWords and will include a link to get directions or click to call the business.

These ads are similar to the organic local business listings on Google mobile searches. Below is an example of one of these ads I found showing today above the typical set of local business listings.

Here’s how that search without “nearby” in the query looked today:

Advertisers must have location extensions enabled in their accounts in order to be eligible to show the new nearby business mobile ad format. I’m not clear what or where the reporting on these ads will be, but will update here when we have more details. Update: Google says the reporting for these ads appears in the location extensions reporting (Ad extensions tab > location extensions), which means there’s no way to know how this particular ad format performs compared to text ads with location extensions showing.

About The Author

Ginny Marvin

Ginny Marvin is Third Door Media's Associate Editor, assisting with the day to day editorial operations across all publications and overseeing paid media coverage. Ginny Marvin writes about paid online marketing topics including paid search, paid social, display and retargeting for Search Engine Land and Marketing Land. With more than 15 years of marketing experience, Ginny has held both in-house and agency management positions. She can be found on Twitter as @ginnymarvin.