Google Ads Affiliate Location Extensions

If you are a manufacturer of a particular product, there’s a good chance you are selling that product in many other store locations, not just your own website. If this is the case, hopefully you’re using Google ads affiliate location extensions. These extensions can help users looking for your products at nearby locations like store chains and retailers again near to them.

So in this video, we’re going to show you how these extensions can appear in the wild, we’re going to show how you can set them up within Google ads, as well as creating location groups, to make sure that where the products are actually being shown are showing the right locations where a user can actually get them, the most important part. Then we’ll close out with how you can look at the reporting metrics for each of the locations that you’ve added within the extensions.

Before we get to the affiliate location extension setup in Google ads, I wanted to show you what these extensions look like within the search results. So I typed in a particular brand and product, this is something I know you can find in stores by me, but instead of seeing ads for that brand, we see a few competitors pop up, and the second competitor has an affiliate location extension.

So we come down below, we see at the very bottom of this ad, underneath the descriptions and it looks like it’s underneath a few call out extensions as well. They’re showcasing the city where I’m at filming this video, and the 12 locations nearby. If I click on this link, they’re taking me to the map locations of where I can buy this product, and remember, it was the competitor’s product, not actually what I looked for. But I still clicked on it because I’m interested. I might want their version because I know I can find it now near me.

So now that we’re at Google maps, I can either get directions to these locations so you can see how it could be very helpful from a mobile device perspective, or I can click on the website links to find any one of these Walmart locations just to confirm if they have it in stock.

So if your product is sold in many stores, doesn’t have to be big chains like this, just any retailer that has multiple locations. You can research to see if any of your affiliate stores has a location within Google, and promote those affiliate locations, to help your customer find your products in stores. So now let’s go into Google ads, and I’ll show you how to set up the affiliate location extension.

I’m in Google ads and we can see I’m already on the extensions page. So if you look in the left-hand navigations, you can see we can find this page by clicking on ads and extensions, and then make sure you’re on the extensions page and not the ads page. This particular account has never set up affiliated location extensions, so I’m going to have to create a brand new one.

To do that, let’s click on the blue plus button, there we see we want to add an extension and then drop down to affiliate location extension. Since this account has never set up affiliate location extensions before, we’re going to set one at the account level, and there are two types of categories we can use for affiliate location extensions. I’m going to switch to the other one first, probably the least common one.

If you work with car dealers, you can select the auto dealer’s category within the drop down, so now let’s choose our auto dealers. First, you’ll have to choose from one of the available countries, and in my location of the United States, we see there are 36 car chains available, most of them are brands that we’re familiar with. I can scroll all the way down, just pick one of the options and then I can click done, and there we see in the ad preview on the right, what this ad extension could look like.

Now if I go back up to the category drop down and select general retailers instead, you will see that my auto dealer selection disappeared. So you can only do one category, odds are you’re going to be one or the other, but I chose general retailers because this is probably going to be the most common one and we get way more options from the general retailers category. So if I go up to try to select my retailers, once again I’ll have to choose my country.

We see there are many more options in the United States for chains that we could choose compared to auto dealers, over 1200 compared to 36, yes, big difference. But this whole list is sorted alphabetically, with the few numeric options at the top. So you’re going to see a bunch of familiar chains, if you were in the United States, that we could keep going down and down and looking at all of the options, and hand picking any of the chains that may sell my products. This is one way to do it. As I’ve been scrolling, we see I just hit B, I’m going to stop at bed bath and beyond, don’t know if we have enough time.

If you already have a list of chains where your product is sold, it’s probably easier just go to the search bar, type in the chain name and select it, so you can see you can add as many chains as you want if they’re in the Google database. Once you have your chain selected, you can go down and click done and then head on over and click save.

So now I’m back in the main extensions category page, this is where we started before, we created the new affiliate location, and I’m purposely going to click on this option to potentially edit it, and I’m going to show you why. Earlier, I said we had to create one at the account level because this account has never had affiliate location extension set up.

This extension could potentially show up if either of these chains has a location within the general vicinity of where my user is searching, and we have definitely worked with e-Commerce clients before, that have sold products in big chains. Walgreens was definitely one of them, but not all product variants were available at every Walgreens location within the United States, some products were only available in warmer temperature areas.

Some SKUs were just test products, and they were only available at their best markets, and our campaign structure within the account had campaigns and ad groups broken up by the specific products. So for some of the product campaigns, where we know they’re not available around the entire country, we want to create deeper extension levels just for those campaigns. So to do that, we can go up to the blue plus button again, and then under the add to categories, we can create deeper affiliate location extensions at the campaign or ad group levels.

Your campaign level affiliate location extensions will override whatever you have set up at the account level, and as you probably can guess, the ad group level will override any campaign and account level extensions. So pretty much the deeper levels get the priority, that’s why it’s always good to have something at the account level, but know that you can get deeper to get more specific and to make sure that you are accurately portraying where users can go and find your products.

So for this one, I’m just going to stick with campaign, then you can go and select the particular campaigns. I’m just choosing one campaign to show you, and then you can select your location groups if you already have them created. Since we don’t, we’ll go down and select new location group.

I already went ahead and named the location group, and then there’s a few ways you can choose to make a location group, remember at the account level I had both of the chain selected, but maybe there’s a particular partnership, paid promo that you’re doing with one of your retailers. So you can go and create a new option just with one retailer, or you can go up and select specific locations.

So I’m going to select a chain, I think I named this location group Midwest. If I go up to the search bar, I’m going to type in Wisconsin, that’s where I’m from. So there’s all the bed bath and beyond locations in Wisconsin, filtered it by Illinois, select all those 26 locations.

If I want to go down and do Walgreens, still in Illinois and back to Wisconsin, we see as I’m scrolling, there were hundreds of locations for Walgreens alone, but we pretty much just have only the locations in Wisconsin and Illinois for the two chains that I originally selected at the account level. If I go and click create, there’s my particular location group, probably should rename it to just Wisconsin in Illinois, but you know to have better naming conventions when you’re creating these extensions for yourself.

So again, that is one way to say if this particular product within this campaign is only available in these chains, in Wisconsin and Illinois, then you can make an affiliate location extension that specific. You saw we can pretty much hand choose the exact locations within each of the chains, because it all comes down to making it as accurate as possible, so that people look for a particular product or a category of product that you’re only showing the locations to the users where they can actually find it. Good user experience, right? Even exist for any offline purchases. In this case, we’re good, so we can save it.

So if you go back up and create a new one, and I need to make a new location group, you saw that from the available chains it was just the two that we originally selected at the account level. What if your company’s growing and different retailers or chains start picking up your product? I can’t add any more at this level, so we need to cancel out of this, and if I scroll down a little bit, you can see Google has a link where you can manage your account level chains.

Here we pretty much get back to the main screen when we first started setting this up, so I’m going to click on the select general retailers link again, select my country again, search for another option and there we see it’s just added to the two that I originally have selected. So go ahead, search for all your other ones, click done and now my account level chains have been updated, and go back down and click save.

This account is brand new to them, we don’t have any stats, so I’m going to hop into a different account, so we can look at the same affiliate locations view and the metrics we can add to really look at performance from this particular extension.

So this account has been running affiliate location extension for years, and one thing we like to do every once in a while is see how each locations are performing. Since these extensions that we could see are sending users to Google maps, encouraging them to visit the store, we really like to focus on the engagement metrics. How many people are clicking on these extensions? Do we see any correlation with internal data of any lifts since we start testing these extensions? We’re lucky that this client can pull sales for each of the retailers by location.

If we get more visibility from our affiliate location extensions, this particular account does see lifts in most of the same areas. So initially we see the clicks, impressions, click-through rate, CPC and overall cost within our date ranges. But we can go down to the columns, and then you can go up and modify your columns if you want to see different views.

You may be curious to understand why there are views, CPV and view rate, one thing I actually did not mention before is that affiliate location extensions can show up on display in YouTube ads. So that’s why you see some of the video columns available for this particular extension.

If we go down to conversions, you can decide to add some of your conversion columns, because it could be interesting to see that maybe they didn’t go to the store, they still clicked on the ad with that extension to still buy on a particular website, depends on what the account is. Attributes will have policy details, item ID type things, you can add call details and then there were message details, this particular account was running for a while when the message extension was more available. So if I just apply that one, we do see some attributed conversions with the affiliate location extension, even though it’s not directly tied to this extension. That is pretty much how you can set up your affiliate location extensions.

If you have any campaigns that really call out the near me type searches, this is pretty much a must include extension for those campaigns or ad groups. If your product is sold in several chains or retailers, and people are looking where they can get it, especially on a mobile device, they might be looking to buy your product or similar products at that very moment. I know it’s tough sometimes when you’re paying for ads, you want to have users go to your website, buy, then so you can see the direct return from it. It’s hard to tell bosses or clients that we should be encouraging people to go off-site and buy somewhere else.

They’re still hopefully going and buying your product, trying to make it as easy and convenient for the user as possible to get your product in their hands. In the end, it will be a better customer experience if you can help them as much as possible. If you have any other questions on affiliate location extensions, or how to search and filter your location groups, please let us know in the comments below.

Written by Joe Martinez