How to Use Dynamic Location Insertion in PPC Adverts

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Google recently released a new feature for Adwords:  the ability to dynamically insert a location into an advert. Instead of manually writing hundreds of adverts to include the location of your stores and then geographically targeting them using many different campaigns, Google can do all the hard work for you using the following advert parameters

• City: {lb.city:London}
• Postal code: {lb.postalCode:E3 LON}
• Phone number: {lb.telephone:02000 000000}

How Dynamic Location Insertion Works:

Google works out the searcher’s location (using ip address/search intent) and crosschecks this against a pre-defined list of all your business locations. If one matches, and you have the adverts set up correctly, the nearest business location is drawn into the advert and shown to the searcher.

The location insertion parameters work in a very similar way to the keyword insertion, so most advertisers will already be familiar with the structure.

For example, you could write this advert with location specific parameters:

Trainers in {lb.city:London}
Nike and Adidas Trainers!
Call {lb.telephone: 02000 000000} to order
www.trainers.com/{lb.city:London}

If you have set up a store – e.g. St Albans – in your Places account, and if someone from St Albans is searching for trainers and the advert shows, it should look like this:

Trainers in St Albans
Nike and Adidas Trainers!
Call 02000 123456 to order
www.trainers.com/StAlbans

If someone searches for trainers in a location where you don’t have a store, they see the generic London advert:

Trainers in London
Nike and Adidas Trainers!
Call 02000 000000 to order
www.trainers.com/London

How to Implement Dynamic Location Insertion:

There is a short process to go through to enable this in your account, so here’s the quickest way to do it:

1)      Enable location extensions – you can either link Adwords directly to a Google places account and draw all your pre-defined business addresses into Adwords in one go, or manually add each business location in Adwords. If you don’t have one, I would advise setting up a Places account as it helps with organic listings too and is reusable.

2)      Build your dynamic adverts – using the three parameters above. The same rules apply as for dynamic keyword insertion, i.e. don’t make the resulting advert so long that it won’t show up.

3)      Filtering

If a Google Places account has a lot of business locations, you need to use filters to ensure only the relevant addresses show.

For example:

You have a range of stores, but they don’t all sell the same things, i.e. if you sold trainers & clothes in most stores, but some of your stores only sold clothes. This involves a bit more set-up time, but it’s the only way to ensure the campaign runs properly. Create separate campaigns for the categories – continuing the example above, we will have trainers and clothing as two separate campaigns.

In the trainers campaign:

Check the filter box in the advert extensions and use the category filter. This should reflect the categories you have set up in Google Places.

This will ensure that only stores tagged as having trainers are able to show in your advert!

Get in touch with your thoughts on this, or leave a comment below.