Location extensions

Location extensions let you show a business address, phone number, or map marker along with your ad text. There are two types of location extensions:

Google Ads location extensions

Help users find your locations by showing your ads with your address, a map to your location, or the distance to your business. This extension type is useful to draw customers to your brick-and-mortar locations.

Affiliate location extensions

Help users find nearby stores of a retail chain that sell your products. This extension type is useful if you sell your products through retail chains and want to reach consumers when they are deciding what and where to buy.

Extension type differences

Affiliate location extensions differ from Google Ads location extensions in the following aspects:

Google Ads location extension	Affiliate location extension
Advertiser should link to a Business Profile first.	No linking to Business Profiles.
Feed locations are created from locations in the Business Profile.	Feed locations are populated based on a chain ID.
Only one feed is allowed per account.	Multiple feeds allowed per account.

Create location extensions

The Google Ads API uses feeds to manage affiliate location extensions.

A Google Ads account can either have a Google Ads location extension or an affiliate location extensions feed, but not both at the same time. If you attempt to create both types of feeds in the same account, a CANNOT_HAVE_LOCATION_AND_AFFILIATE_LOCATION_FEEDS error is returned.

The process for creating Google Ads location extensions and affiliate location extensions are similar.

1. Create a new Feed and set its origin field to GOOGLE.

   Set the system_feed_generation_data field to provide additional details on how to populate the field.

   Perform a FeedService.MutateFeeds create operation to create the feed.

   Google Ads servers use information from the system_feed_generation_data field to create and populate the feed, performing the following tasks:

   • Creates feed attributes for your feed.
   • Creates a FeedMapping for your feed.

   • Populates the feed with a list of FeedItem objects corresponding to the relevant locations.

     Locations can be obtained from either the Business Profile or the locations list of retail chains that you specified when creating the feed.

2. Wait for Google Ads API to set up your feed.

   You can fetch the FeedMapping associated with the feed and perform retries using an exponential backoff algorithm.

3. Once the feed is ready, associate the feed with the customer by creating a CustomerFeed.

4. Optionally, associate the feed to a customer, campaign, or ad group.