In July, Google announced the ability to link Google My Business accounts (previously known as Google Places) and AdWords accounts. This allowed for all business locations to be managed through Google My Business and eliminated the need to set up locations for each individual campaign in AdWords. In addition to the easier location management Google My Business provides, it also provides a way for businesses to offer more information on the search page. Phone number, business hours, addresses, and maps are a few examples of information that would appear via a linked Google My Business account but would not when manually entering location information for each campaign. This increases your real estate on the search page by placing a large block of information where other ads would typically appear.

Google continued to allow existing campaign level locations to run through the end of October but removed the ability to add new locations in August. Last month, Google began the final steps in upgrading to account-level location extensions by removing non-upgraded location extensions and copying this information to a Google My Business account. However, management of the account is up to each business. Keeping hours, locations and contact information current in your Google My Business account will automatically apply to all campaigns and will allow users to find you easily. This can be especially important when users are on mobile devices and want to reach a business quickly by phone or are searching for a location nearby. Lastly, simply having this information on a search page, whether needed or not, provides additional credibility to your brand and moves other advertisers further down the page, both of which, should drive more traffic to your brand.

Additional information on linking these two tools can be found in the Google Help Center, Search Engine Land and Search Engine Watch.