Location groups allow you to more easily manage locations in your campaigns from within Google Ads. When you've synced your Business Profile and Google Ads accounts, or have added Chain or Maps locations to your account, these addresses are eligible to show across your account. You can assign (also known as associate) specific locations at the account, campaign, and ad group levels.
This article describes what location groups do and the benefits of using them when setting up location assets in your campaigns and promoting those location assets in your ads. This article also shows you how to use location groups to filter at the account, campaign, or ad group levels, and how to add filters to edit at the account level.
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What are location groups
Location groups are reusable collections of physical business locations that can be applied to your account, campaign, or individual ad groups. A group can be selected instead of individual locations to quickly and efficiently apply every location in that group for a campaign’s targeting.
To use location groups, you need to enable location assets in your Google Ads Account. Location assets can show you your business information in various formats across Search, Display, Performance Max, and video campaigns. Location assets can include both your directly owned store locations or stores that sell your products.
Benefits of using location groups
Convenient
Location groups are simple to set up and easy to parse through for editing. The location group interface allows you to find individual locations through searching and filtering.
Reusable
Once created, a location group can be selected and applied to as many campaigns as you want. Any changes you make to a location group will apply everywhere that the group is being used.
Example
Say you are running a Performance Max for store goals that applies to every location in California. You can create a new location group that contains each one of your California storefront locations. Once you set up the statewide campaign, you’ll have a location group ready to insert in campaign setup. You can then use that location group for Performance Max with store goals, as well as other campaigns and ad groups, or even set it as the default for your entire account.
Instructions
Before performing the steps below, follow the instructions on how to create location groups .
Add location groups filtering at the campaign or ad group level- Go to Assets
within the Campaignsmenu
.
- Select the plus button and select Location.
- In the “Add location assets” section, look for the “Add to” section, then find Account, Campaign, and Ad group.
- Choose “Campaign” or “Ad group” depending on whether you want to filter locations to a campaign or ad group. If you’re adding a location asset on the ad group level, choose your desired ad group as well.
- From the "Select location source" dropdown, choose one of the following:
- Location groups: In the menu below, choose the checkbox right next to the location group you have created. If the location group is or becomes empty, they function the same as the “No location assets” setting.
- No location assets: This option tells Google Ads not to associate any location with the selected campaign or ad group.
- All locations: This option tells Google Ads to associate all locations (you can view them from Location manager ) with the selected campaign or ad group.
- Select Save.
- Go to Assets
within the Campaignsmenu
- Select the plus button , and select Location.
- In the “Add location” section, look for “Add to”, then find Account, Campaign, and Ad group.
- Select Accountto apply the location group as a default for all your campaigns.
- From the "Select location source" dropdown, choose one of the following:
- Location groups: In the menu below, choose the checkbox right next to the location group you created. If the location group is empty, they function the same as the “No location assets” setting. The location group setting is the account-wide default for all your campaigns except for those already associated with another location asset. Note that locations that don’t belong to the specified location groups can still be used to associate at campaign or ad group level.
- All locations: This option tells Google Ads to associate all locations (you can view them from Location manager ) with all campaigns except those already associated with another location asset. Choose this option to restore locations especially when they are accidentally switched off using Google Ads APIs.
- Select Save.
You can go back to the Assets page, and select Associationsunder “Table view” to find the newly added account-level location groups.
In addition to using the filtering method at account level above, there is yet another way to filter if the location assets are created by linking your Ads account to the Business Profile. Note that any Business Profile listing not matching the filters won’t get synced into your Ads account and hence won’t be usable at campaign or ad group levels.
- Go to Assets
within the Campaignsmenu
- Under the "Associations" tab, you’ll find a table with all of your assets.
- Select “Location” to filter assets down to only location assets.
- Select your Business Profile you want to add filters to.
- Hover over the account you want to make changes to and select the pencil icon
when it appears.
- Under the “Limit the locations that are synced with Google Ads” section:
- Fill in your business name. Filters will only work if you've entered information that exactly matches the word you've chosen. For example, if you enter a filter for the business name "Bob's," you won't filter out businesses with the name "Bob's Barbecue.”
- You can narrow down the locations further with specific labels. Labels must be added to locations in Google Business Profile before applying filters in Google Ads. Add label name and select + Orto expand your list of Business Profile locations.
- Select Finish.
