Location extensions allow you to "extend" your AdWords campaigns by attaching your business addresses to each ad. For those who use online advertising to drive traffic to your brick and mortar locations, this feature allows you to include information such as your business name, address and phone number in your existing text ads. When a potential customer performs a search, their location is matched to your local business listings and you're most relevant location appears within your ad on Google.com and Google Maps. 

If you're a business owner, you can set up extensions by linking an AdWords campaign to your Google Places account (formerly known as Google Local Business Center). If you're not the primary business owner of the locations you're advertising, you can manually enter up to 9  addresses directly into AdWords. For example, a sportswear brand that distributes to a number of different stores might want to associate their ads with various store locations through extensions, even though they don't own the store locations.

Setting Up Your Extensions:

5 Steps to Transition Your Ads to Location extensions

1.    Organize Your Addresses in Google Places

2.    Choose Relevant Landing Pages

3.    Connect Your Google Places account with your  AdWords account

4.    Review All Existing Local Business Ads and Create New Ads

5.    Review your Geo-Targeting Settings

These are also available on the AdWords site here: five simple steps.

With location extensions you can:

·         Deliver more exposure and local relevance

·         Use the same ads for all your business locations without the overhead of maintaining a different ad for each location   

Location extensions are the latest and greatest in AdWords advances, replacing the Local Business Ad format. If you don't transition your existing Local Business Ads on your own, Google will begin doing it automatically in the coming weeks if they haven't done it already. They will also replace your Local Business Ads with text ads that are compatible with extensions. To learn more, please visit www.google.com/adwords/lbatransition.