Local customer optimization is a feature within Performance Max campaigns for store goals that allows you to prioritize reaching potential customers who are close to or interested in your business area and ready to take action immediately such as visit or contact.
This campaign feature is intended to reach potential customers at the most critical moment when they are actively navigating, trip-planning, or searching for locations on Google Maps, Waze or Google Search for a service in a specific area of interest.
Learn more About Performance Max for store goals.
On this page
- Benefits of Local customer optimization
- Steps to enable Local customer optimization toggle
- Updating your Conversion goal
Benefits of Local customer optimization
Local customer optimization may help businesses with physical locations increase their local visibility and offers the following additional benefits:
- Capture ready-to-act customers: Reach users who are ready to take actions immediately as they plan routes, search for services, or travel near your business location with immediate intent to act.
- Targeted local reach: Target users near your business area by directing campaign budgets to locally tailored ads on channels such as Google Maps, Waze and local formats on Google Search.
Steps to enable Local customer optimization
Create a new Performance Max for store goals campaign with Local customer optimization toggle
When you create a Performance Max campaign optimizing only to offline goals, the Local customer optimization toggle will be available to turn on this feature
- Go to Campaigns within the Campaigns menu
.
- Select + New campaign.
- Choose your campaign objective as Local store visits and promotions, then select Performance Max as the campaign type.
- Confirm the conversion goals such as store visits, store sales, contacts (Google hosted), or directions (Google hosted) for store goals for your campaign.
- You’ll find a “Local customer optimization” panel with a toggle to turn on the feature.
- Select your business locations to target, either from your Business Profile account or your linked location or affiliate location assets.
- If your account is linked to Merchant Center account, deselect “Advertiser products from a Merchant Center account” as local customer optimization is not compatible with Performance Max campaigns with products from Merchant Center.
- Select Continue.
Manage Local Customer Optimization in an existing Performance Max for store goals campaign
Steps to enable local customer optimization in an existing Performance Max for store goals campaigns.
- Go to Campaigns within the Campaigns menu
- Select the campaign you want to edit.
- Note: if the selected campaign is advertising products from a Merchant Center account, it will not be compatible with local customer optimization even if the toggle is turned on. Instead, consider selecting a different campaign or creating a new one.
- Go to the “Budget and bidding optimization” section in the “Settings” page.
- You can turn on the feature under the new setting Local customer optimization panel.
- Select Save after you enable the toggle for the campaign to start optimizing for local users.
If you want to go back to the standard Performance Max campaign for store goals, disable the toggle and select Save.
Updating your conversion goal
In order to add an online goal to your campaign, you'll need to toggle off Local customer optimization (if toggled on).
- Go to Campaigns within the Campaigns menu
- Select the campaign you want to edit.
- Find the “Budget and bidding optimization” section in the campaign settings.
- Turn off the "Local customer optimization" toggle and select Save.
- Under “Conversion goals” select Change campaign goals.
- Note: If you have not turned off the Local customer optimization toggle, the conversion goal dialog box will show information about why the conversion goals are disabled and it will direct you to the “Local customer optimization” drop down.
- Select the goal you want, and select Save.
- Select Save in the “Conversion goals” drop down.
