How to optimise Google Local Campaigns for your business
Google released Local Campaigns in the middle of 2019. While its capabilities for brick-and-mortar locations are exciting, some marketers are hesitant to run this type of campaign because of the lack of control. There are no bid adjustments, no placement, demographic, or device targeting, and even ad scheduling is nowhere to be found.
In today’s blog, digital marketing specialist Alwin reveals how Local Campaigns performed for our client Busaba, and also how we managed to schedule ads with a little hack.
Using a Local Campaign for our client
Busaba is a Thai restaurant with brick and mortar locations across London, so this client seemed like the perfect candidate to start a Local campaign for as this is the type of company Google had in mind when releasing their new campaign type.
How did this Local Campaign perform?
The short answer – exceptionally well! We have been running local campaigns for a couple of clients and are impressed at the number of store visits driven. Due to ad assets including text, images, and video, local campaigns are proving to be an all-rounder campaign type. Besides increasing store visits, it drives a huge number of impressions that are comparable to or exceed our display campaigns.
So, if you want a display type campaign that is more conversion-focused – as long as the conversions are store visits – then Local campaigns would fill the role perfectly.
Issue with ad scheduling
When we found out ad scheduling wasn’t possible, we reached out to Google Support to gain a bit of clarity on how we would ensure ads only show during store hours. We were informed that Local Campaigns should automatically show only during store hours. Since Google My Business was linked with the Ads account, this made sense. Unfortunately, this wasn’t the case at all, and the ads showed at all times.
Local campaigns will automatically run all day, and not show according to your Google My Business store opening hours.
How to ensure Local Campaigns only show during store hours
Since Local Campaigns are so focused on driving walk-ins, showing ads outside of store hours felt like a waste of money, so we decided to look into alternative options and found a solution by following the steps below:
- Once your Local Campaign is set up, go into the campaign level.
- Once there, click on the ‘More’ button, then click ‘Create an automated rule’.
- Under ‘type of rule’, select ‘Pause campaigns’.
- Here, choose the ‘Select campaigns’ option, search for and select the checkbox for your campaign, then click done.
- Set frequency to daily and your time at your store closing hours or whenever you’d like the ads to stop showing. Set ‘using data from’ to same day, and name and save your rule.
- Now to set the campaigns to be enabled the morning after, just repeat the steps above, but selecting ‘Enable campaigns’ this time, and setting the time to when your store opens in the morning.
Your selected Local Campaign should now start pausing every evening when your store closes, and be enabled the next morning when the store opens.
If you have a suitable business, why not try Local Campaigns to drive more business to your storefront? If you need some help, you can always contact us and we can help you out.
