Google's new location extensions is good news for ad pros

With Google's new “location extensions” addition to its AdWords platform announced last week, small businesses will soon have the ability to extend their AdWords campaign by attaching their business addresses to their ads. So what does this actually mean for local businesses advertising online?

This feature is the latest extension of Google’s Local Business Center, which launched in 2005 and has not really gotten significant traction. Google is clearly making a big effort to add value for its small business owner customers through LBC, and to that end I think the location extension feature it is a good small step.

For advertising professionals, this is very good news. Including location in ad formats works well for many local businesses, and this puts yet another key tool at their disposal. Using this functionality is important as Google Maps is the fastest growing part of Google and increasingly where a large share of local search is happening. While this change is good for ad pros, the big question from my perspective is, ‘Do local business owners really want to service their own ad accounts?’ All of this infrastructure assumes the small business owner has the time and the inclination to manage all of this on his/her own. Given that 40% of small and medium size businesses do not even have a website, I do not see this as being useful to the majority of small businesses for some time.

Guest blog post by Court Cunningham, Yodle CEO