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Do you run a local business? Are your customers mainly people from the nearby area? It's perfect, because in today's article, we'll introduce you to local campaigns in Google Ads that are designed to promote businesses just like yours!
What is local marketing?
Local marketing is a way to reach users who are close to your business location. It is an excellent choice for small businesses, restaurants, and service stations. Thanks to local marketing, they can reach potential customers more effectively and build the position of their brand in the region.
Statistics show how important local marketing is. According to them, 46% of all Google searches include a location. In addition, as many as 97% of users searched for local businesses on the Internet at least once. For this reason, it is important to reach people in our area because they can easily become our regular customers.
Now that we know what local marketing is, the question arises as to how to apply it. We can conduct this type of marketing by setting up a listing in Google My Business, actively running social media profiles, or offline activities. In addition, to reach your target group more effectively, we can run paid local advertising on the Internet, which we will focus on in this article.
Before starting our marketing activities, it is also worth conducting a simple competition and market analysis, which we have already written about on our blog.
How to set up a local campaign using Performance Max?
One of the most popular ways to promote on the Internet is through Google Ads. Thanks to this tool, we can reach many users who may be interested in our services or products. In Google Ads, we can set up different types of campaigns, such as search, display, video, or app ads. In this article, we will focus on local campaigns that offer the greatest opportunity to reach local customers.
Historically, in Google Ads, local campaigns were a separate campaign type, but in 2022, Performance Max campaigns replaced them. Performance campaigns have many advantages, because thanks to them we can maximize the effectiveness of our marketing objectives and display ads throughout the whole Google advertising ecosystem.
Performance Max ads consist of multiple elements and can appear in multiple locations. We need to provide the system with images, logos, headers, long headers, and ad descriptions. Optionally, we can also add a video, or Google will create it for us automatically. We should also add additional assets such as a phone number, pricing information, callouts, sitelinks, and structured snippets.
For local campaigns, the most important thing is to add locations or location groups. To do this, you need to synchronize your business profile with your Google Ads account or add chain store locations to your account. After adding a location, our ads will show the location of our business in the form of an address and a map. Some locations will also show user ratings and information about the facilities available at our location, such as the ability to pick up products ordered online.
There is also an option to add a local product feed, which can be useful for many businesses. This is a mandatory setting for online stores that also sell offline. For a potential customer, availability in the store can be a factor that will encourage him to buy in your store instead of your competition.
When setting up the campaign, we also need to choose its goals. They should match our offline goals, i.e. it is recommended to optimize the ad for shop visits or purchases in a store, clicks leading to phone calls, and routing to our location.
What results can you get from local advertising?
Among our clients, we had the opportunity to test local Performance Max campaigns. Our observations have shown that this type of campaign can be very effective in reaching potential customers while keeping advertising costs low.
In the case of our client, the aim of the campaign was to bring traffic to an exclusive boutique in the city center. For this reason, we narrowed the targeting to a specific location, and in the ads, we focused on presenting the uniqueness of this brand in order to distinguish it from the competition. The campaign achieved very good results, as the average cost of conversion was slightly over 4 zł and the cost of clicking on the ad was only 0.38 zł. Most of the conversions involved routing to a boutique.
Due to their low costs, local campaigns can be a good choice for companies with small advertising budgets that are unable to compete with national competition. Therefore, if you need help with local marketing, contact us. We will be happy to help you!
Sources:
Google, Upgrade Smart Shopping and Local campaigns to Performance Max: https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/11605187?hl=en
Google, About Local campaigns: https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/9118422?hl=pl
Google, About location groups and filtering: https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/9288588
Safari Digital, 18 Local SEO Statistics That Matter in 2023 https://www.safaridigital.com.au/blog/local-seo-statistics/
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