Location groups allow you to more easily manage locations in your campaigns from within Google Ads. When you've synced your Business Profile and Google Ads accounts, or have added Chain or Maps locations to your account, these addresses are eligible to show across your account. You can assign (also known as associate) specific locations at the account, campaign, and ad group levels by using Location Groups.
This article describes what location groups do and the benefits of using them when setting up location assets in your campaigns and promoting those location assets in your ads. This article also shows you how to use location groups to filter at the account, campaign, or ad group levels, and how to add filters to edit your Business profile link at the account level.
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What are location groups
Location groups are reusable collections of physical business locations that can be applied to your account, campaign, or individual ad groups. The most common use case is to apply location groups at the campaign level. A location group can be selected instead of individual locations to quickly and efficiently apply every location in that group for a campaign’s targeting.
To use location groups, you need to enable location assets in your Google Ads Account by linking a location source. Location assets can show you your business information in various formats across Search, Display, Performance Max, and video campaigns. Location assets can include both your directly owned store locations or stores that sell your products.
Benefits of using location groups
Convenient
Location groups are simple to set up and easy to parse through for editing. The location group interface allows you to find individual locations through searching and filtering.
Reusable
Once created, a location group can be selected and applied to as many campaigns (or ad groups) as you want. Any changes you make to a location group will apply everywhere that the group is being used.
Example
Say you are running a Performance Max for store goals that applies to every location in California. You can create a new location group that contains each one of your California storefront locations. Once you set up the statewide campaign, you’ll have a location group ready to insert in campaign setup. You can then use that location group for Performance Max with store goals, as well as other campaigns and ad groups, or even set it as the default for your entire account.
Instructions
Before performing the steps below, follow the instructions on how to create location groups.
Add location groups filtering at the campaign or ad group level- Go to Assets within the Campaigns menu
.
- Select the plus button and select Location.
- In the “Add location assets” section, look for the “Add to” section, then find Account, Campaign, and Ad group.
- Choose “Campaign” or “Ad group” depending on whether you want to filter locations to a campaign or ad group.
- From the "Select location source" dropdown, choose one of the following:
- Location groups: In the menu below, choose the checkbox right next to the location group you have created. If the location group is or becomes empty, they function the same as the “No location assets” setting, so make sure to confirm the location group does have locations.
- No location assets: This option tells Google Ads not to associate any location with the selected campaign or ad group.
- All locations: This option tells Google Ads to associate all locations (you can view them from Location manager) with the selected campaign or ad group.
- Select Save.
.- Go to Assets within the Campaigns menu
- Select the plus button, and select Location.
- In the “Add location” section, look for “Add to”, then find Account, Campaign, and Ad group.
- Select Account to apply the location group as a default for all your campaigns.
- From the "Select location source" dropdown, choose one of the following:
- Location groups: In the menu below, choose the checkbox right next to the location group you created. If the location group is empty, they function the same as the “No location assets” setting. The location group setting is the account-wide default for all your campaigns except for those already associated with another location asset.
- All locations: This option tells Google Ads to associate all locations (you can view them from Location manager) with all campaigns except those already associated with another location group. Choose this option to restore your account level location link if it was accidentally removed through Google Ads Editor or the Google Ads APIs.
- Select Save.
You can go back to the Assets page, and select Associations under “Table view” to find the newly added account-level location groups.
In addition to using location groups to filter locations in your account, specific campaigns or ad groups, there are 2 additional types of filters that can be set when a Business Profile is linked to your Google Ads account level.
These filters can either be added during the account level linking process (in the Assets view or Location Manager) but once a Business Profile is already linked to the account level, these filters can be added after the fact in Location Manager only.
- Business name filter: Enables it so that only locations (listings) with the exact business name in your business name filter sync to Google Ads, instead of all businesses the Business profile. The business name must match exactly, if you enter a filter for the business name "Bob's," this will not include businesses with the name "Bob's Barbecue.”
- Label filter: You can apply labels to locations (listings) in the Business profile so that only locations with those specific filters (up to 3) will sync to Google Ads. Adding addition labels are ‘OR’ versus ‘ AND’, therefore if you add label 1 and 2, locations with either label or both will sync.
- If a Business Profile is already linked to your Google Ads account, navigate to Tools > Shared Library > Location Manager > Business Locations tab.
- Click the blue edit pencil sign.
- Under the “Limit the locations that are synced with Google Ads” section:
- Fill in your business name. Filters will only work if you enter the exact business name of locations in your GBP. For example, if you enter a filter for the business name "Bob's," locations with the business name "Bob's Barbecue” will not sync.
- You can narrow down the locations further with specific labels. Labels must be added to locations in the Google Business Profile before applying filters in Google Ads. Add label name and select ‘+ Or’ to add up to 3 label filters.
- Select Save.
