There are a few major ways to advertise online, but regardless of the exact medium you choose, there’s one sector that is likely crucial to your business: local ads. Yes, there are online only companies, and that was once the backbone of search advertisement. That’s changed as local businesses have tuned into the search game and found ways to bolster their business. Additionally, larger organizations are using local ads to pitch region-specific deals, discounts, and more. That’s why GoogleAdWords offered so many location targeting tools. Apparently, however, they overstepped with these features; several local targeting options are being whittled away in the coming months.
Here are the items that will no longer be available to advertisers.
- Select regions will vanish. That’s not because of the rapture, but it’s actually for reasons fairly similar to that. Countries change their boundaries, certain regional targeting mechanisms overlap, places get blown up, you get the idea. While the current regions will remain in place through July 11th, those who haven’t manually migrated to the new suggested regions will automatically have their content re-targeted.
- Custom shapes will no longer be available. You used to be able to create multi-point polygonal targeting maps usingAdWords. As of July, that feature will be disabled. As of the end of 2011, any polygonal targeting will be nixed completely.
- “Show address” will no longer be an option. Google is making room for some of their other local options, including thelocation extensions, by removing this feature. Users will have to check out the location extension for remaining options, which will be integrated with their Google Places page.
This dropping of extra weight continues to follow recent trends from Google. We’ve seen similar feature drops, the abandonmentof big projects, the merging of multiple projects, and similar far more often than usual since April, when Larry Page re-took the CEO position at Google. While it’s easy to get miffed over lost features, the move also represents a greater amount of focus for Google’s immense features. Whether it means weal or woe, though, is impossible to say – yet.
[via the Google AdWords Blog]
