Location insertion lets you tailor your responsive search ad text to your customers' locations, regular locations, or locations of interest. Location insertion for responsive search ads highlights a location in the ad text where your product or service is offered. For example, you can create headlines like “Las Vegas Hotels”, “San Francisco Hotels”, or “Palo Alto Plumbers On Demand” to customize your ads to your users locations, regular locations, or locations of interest.
This article explains how location insertion for responsive search ads works in Google Ads, and how to set it up.
Benefits
- Tailored messaging: Ads are localized based on physical location or area of interest. Find out more about how we determine these geographic locations.
- Efficiency: Instead of having to upload thousands of rows and manage an ad customizer file, you can customize your ads to the city, state, or country you want to show.
How it works
Let's say you own a delivery service that delivers to all cities in the Bay Area. Instead of writing individual headlines for each city, you could use a location insertion code in your ad headline to target the San Francisco Bay Area:
Headline code: We deliver to {LOCATION(City)}
Google Ads will try to replace this code with the location in your ad group. You can select 1 location for your headline and up to 2 in your descriptions. You need at least 3 headlines without location insertion, or you can use default text. You can select to set up locations for city, state, and country.
Before you begin
Locations are selected from your campaigns location targeting. Make sure your campaign location targeting is set to the right scope for your business, and the level set on your location insertion is appropriate given your campaign location targeting.
Set up location insertion for responsive search ads
Follow the steps in Create a responsive search ad.
- When you're entering ad text, type a brace ( { ) and select Location insertion from the drop-down menu.
- In the “Default text” section, type the word or words you want to appear when the text can't be replaced by a location. This is optional.
- Choose what level of location you want to show:
- City
- Note: If you have location targeting set up based on DMA region, the closest city will be inserted.
- State
- Note: The State level isn't compatible with other countries' equivalents, such as provinces, preferences, or regions.
- Country
- City
- Click Apply.
You can view and manage your targeted locations by going to “Locations” in the page menu on the left. Your locations will be in the “Targeted location” section.
Keep in mind
Your ad text is subject to Google Ads policies.
How to fix a problem with location insertion
There are a few reasons why location insertion might not be working for you:
- By default, when you create a responsive search ad, headlines and descriptions can appear in any order. You can control where individual headlines and descriptions appear in your ad by pinning headlines and descriptions to specific positions. In order to pin a location headline, you need at least 3 headlines.
- You need at least 3 headlines without location insertion, or you can use default text.
- Make sure you have enough characters for location insertion. If you use too many characters in your headline, you may not have enough room for some of the location names you’ve selected if they go over the character limit.
- Make sure your campaign location targeting is set to the right scope for your business, and the level set on your location insertion is appropriate given your campaign location targeting.
