03 April 2006

Google Local Business Ads coming onstream

As reported last week, Google local is now offering targeted advertising services. At the moment, the number of advertisers come to just a handful of testers, who get a tailored icon on the map to raise awareness and a branded presence in their pop up bubble - usually a 125 pixel square static (no animations) logo and contact details or sometimes a link.

Although you can upload your logo, the icon needs to be selected from a list provided by Google. Icons reported so far include:

• coffee cup
• shopping bag
• grocery cart
• a car
• a flower

Though it has been noted that their correlation with the actual services in question is sometimes a little, well, random, that's either because of exuberant experimentation by early adopters, or possibly due to the small selection of icons Google has initially supplied.

Dominic Preuss, product manager for Google's local advertising, has confirmed that this is the extent of the new feature and further levels of interactivity, such as video or click to call, are not planned, cooling some of the initial and over-excited speculation about where this development might lead. Even so, it's a small advantage over Yahoo!'s text-only local advertiser offering.

The service is called Google Local Business Ad and is accessed as through the usual Adwords portal at the AdGroup level. Icons are selected at the campaign level, so all your keywords would be associated with the same icon. Any logos uploaded are subject to review before use.

Merchants are only charged for the click if the user clicks through from the pop-up balloon information box. Further information is available directly from Google:

http://adwords.google.com / support / bin / topic.py?topic=8484

If you're not listed in Google local already, you need to add your business through your Local Business Centre, Froogle, Google Base, or through the local data provider that feeds your Google Local.

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