Local campaigns began automatically upgrading to Performance Max in August 2022. All new campaigns optimizing to store goals should be created in Performance Max. With the upcoming completion of the upgrade, new Local campaigns creation will no longer be supported. You can find more information on creating Performance Max campaigns for store goals in the Help Center.
Local campaigns help you to connect online advertising to your storefront. You can promote your stores on Google search results, maps, YouTube and other websites.
Google Ads Tutorials: Setting up Local campaigns
Eligibility criteria
To access Local campaigns, you’ll need to have active location assets or affiliate location assets in your account or have a Business Profile connected to Google Ads.
To support performance, we recommend running your campaigns for a minimum of 30 days and targeting 10 or more locations per account (can be spread across multiple campaigns).
Eligibility for store sales measurement for Local campaigns:
- Local campaigns currently have higher threshold requirements in order to be eligible to use store sales. As a result, not all advertisers who meet the general store sales requirements are currently able to use store sales with Local campaigns at this time. Google is working towards improving the requirements to allow more accounts to become eligible. Learn more about store sales measurement (for retailers and restaurants)
- If you already see store sales reporting and the option to optimize your campaign towards store sales, you are already eligible to use it. If you don’t see these options, we recommend running a Local campaign with store visits for 45 days to properly assess your eligibility. If you become eligible for store sales during this period, you’ll automatically start getting reporting and you’ll have access to the bidding.
This article explains how to create a Local campaign.
Instructions
1. Create a Local campaign
Create new campaign
- Sign in to your Google Ads account.
- Click Campaigns from the page menu on the left.
- Click the plus icon
and select New campaign.
- In the “New campaign” window, select Local store visits and promotions.
- In the next panel you can make a selection to either use Business Profile to select your store locations or affiliate locations to select stores in which your products are sold. Click the radio button next to the option you want to choose.
- For Business Profile, you can select all locations in the account for the Local by checking “Use all locations in your linked Business Profile”. You can also uncheck the box to select a specific subset of your locations. Click Use location group to apply an existing group, or Create new location group to manually assemble and name a set locations. That set will be applied to your campaign and saved as a reusable location group. Learn more about location groups
- For “affiliate locations”, choose an existing location group or create a new one. To create a group with all locations within a chain, use Select by chain (locations may take a few minutes to sync after saving). To create a group with a subset of locations from the chain, use Select by specific locations.
- Geographic radius targeting will be inferred based on the physical business locations specified for your campaign. If needed, you can exclude certain geographic locations from your campaign.
- Click Continue.
2. Select your Local campaign settings
Select campaign settings
- Enter a name for your campaign in the “Campaign name” field.
- Fill out the text assets for your ad, including the following:
| Asset | Required or optional | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Headline | Required | Up to 5 lines of text to catch the attention of potential buyers. Make each of the headlines unique from each other for the most effect. Limit of 30 characters. |
| Description | Required | Up to 5 lines of text that summarize your offer. Limit of 60 characters. |
| Call to action | Required | Up to 5 lines of text informing users of how to interact with your business. Limit of 11 characters. |
| Final URL | Required | The URL you want your ad to take users to. Must be a valid URL |
| Display path | Optional |
Up to 2 lines of text to complete a URL that users will be able to see on your ad. The domain must be the same as the Final URL. If you leave this blank, Google Ads will use your final URL as the display URL. *You can specify 2 paths |
| Mobile final URL | Optional | The URL to take your users to. Consider if the target site is mobile-friendly. Must be a valid URL |
- Click the Images and logos box to search and upload images for use in your ads. Your campaign must have at least 1 image with a 1.91:1 ratio, and 1 logo with a 1:1 ratio in order to serve. The following images and logo sizes are accepted (up to 20 each per campaign):
| Image ratio | Minimum size | Maximum file size |
|---|---|---|
| 1.91:1 | 600x314 | 5mb |
| 1:1 | 314x314 | 5mb |
| 1:1 (Logo image) | 116x116 | 5mb |
*You can crop your images to fit a 1:1 or 1.91:1 resolution. Accepted formats: jpg and png.
- Add a video. This step is required and the video must be at least 10 seconds in length.
- Enter a valid YouTube URL.
- Enter information for the following settings:
- Languages: The eligible languages you are aiming to target with your ad
- Bidding: The default bidding strategy is to maximize conversion value, which will automatically maximize the value of your conversions within your average daily budget. If you only select one conversion action, such as store visits, bidding will maximize total conversions at your conversion value. In this case, bidding works in the same way as Maximize conversions.
- Average daily budget: How much you’re willing to spend per day on your ad campaign. Contact your account manager for budget guidance.
- Additional settings: An expandable section where you can input tracking or a specific mobile URL.
- Click Save and continue at the bottom.
- Your campaign will now be ready. On the next page, you can review your campaign’s settings. Click Ad assets to review the text and images you set for your ad.
Connect to local product feed
You can also promote the products and services available at each location. These steps show you how to connect your campaign to a local product feed. Before you begin you’ll have to first create a local product feed in the “business data” section.
- Follow the instructions above to create a Local campaign.
- Scroll to the bottom of your settings, and expand Additional settings.
- Expand “Product feed”. Check the box for Use a product feed for this campaign.
- Select your feed source.
- Google Ads (local product feed): With this option, you can select a local product feed that you’ve created in “business data”.
- Merchant Center (local product feed): With this option, you’ll connect the Local Products in a Merchant Center account to this campaign. (Note that this option is currently available only to some Google Ads users and will be available to all users soon)
- Select a Merchant Center account.
- Enter or paste a list of product IDs from this account, and click Add products.
- Drag your IDs in the order in which you want them to appear as ads.
You can select a minimum of 5 products per store in order for the campaign to serve your ads. We recommend you to choose 5 to 10 products.
3. Create additional ad groups
If you have more than one set of creative assets, you can create multiple ad groups. This approach works well for assets that represent different creative themes or should run on a specific schedule. Once you’ve created your Local campaign, you can then add more ad groups.
Create ad groups
- Click Campaigns in the page menu to see a full list of your Google Ads campaigns.
- In this list, click the name of the Local campaign in which you'd like to add more ad groups.
- Click Ad groups.
- Click the plus icon
- Fill out all the assets (see details above).
- Click Save and continue at the bottom.
You can set up automated rules to pause or enable your ad groups to run at certain times.
4. Optimize bidding
Local campaigns use Maximize conversion value bid strategy. This bid strategy automatically maximizes the conversion value of store sales, store visits, call clicks, or driving directions for your campaign based on your average daily budget.
Conversion bidding guidelines
Conversion actions availability may depend on your account or campaign
- If your Local campaign is eligible for store sales reporting, store sales optimization (bidding) will be the default optimization goal when you create a new Local campaign. You can switch to store visits if your preference is to optimize the conversion type instead. To do this, deselect ‘store sales’ first by unchecking the box, and click “store visits”. Note that both conversion actions (store sales and store visits) can’t be selected at the same time. Learn more about store sales measurement (for retailers and restaurants)
- If you’re currently measuring store visits in your account, but you aren’t eligible for store sales, you’ll have store visits bidding automatically enabled for Local campaigns. Learn more about how to show store visit conversions
- If you're not measuring either store visits or store sales, you can still use Local campaigns with local actions bidding (call clicks, driving directions, or a combination of both). Learn more about local actions conversions
To ensure Maximize conversion value bidding works properly, set a conversion value for your conversion actions.
- By default, the conversion value for any of these conversion actions is set to 1.
- Bidding will optimize for max conversion value at your specified budget.
- If you select just one conversion action, such as store visits, bidding will maximize total conversions with your specified value at your conversion value.
- If you have multiple goals (such as store visits and local actions), we recommend assigning values to reflect the relative worth of each goal to your business. For example: If you use the default value of 1 for both store visits and local actions, bidding will optimize for both goals equally. If you set the store visit value to the estimated revenue driven by a visit to the store, you should also update the default value of local actions to reflect the estimated revenue or relative value driven by that action.