Last year, we announced upgraded location extensions, a more efficient way to manage and use business locations in ads by linking Google My Business and AdWords accounts. To help you manage your business locations more easily at scale, we’re now releasing the Google My Business API.

Google My Business will be the central repository for managing your business locations. The creation of manual location extensions as feed items through the AdWords API has been deprecated and will sunset in Q2 2016. Please update your code before March 31, 2016 to avoid being impacted by this transition.

Supported features
The first version of the Google My Business API allows you to read, create, update and delete unverified business locations. Supported attributes are name, address, contact numbers, URL, categories, and business hours. Unverified locations can be used as location extensions in AdWords, but have to be verified to be eligible to show up on Google Maps.

Future releases of the Google My Business API will support additional functionality that will allow you to fully manage your location data across Google Ads and Maps.

Getting started with the Google My Business API
If you already use the AdWords API and manage more than 50 business locations, you can apply for access to the Google My Business API. Once granted, you will have access to the Google My Business API documentation and you can follow the steps there to get started. For accounts with 50 or fewer locations, please use Google My Business Locations for now.

Linking locations to accounts, campaigns or ad groups as location extensions
Users managing multi-location businesses (chains) must have a separate Google My Business account for each chain for bulk-verification. If you already manage locations under bulk-verified accounts in Google My Business today, you can link those accounts to AdWords to have your location extensions in sync.

For developers managing AdWords accounts with a large number of locations for small and medium businesses, we recommend creating one Google My Business account as a central repository for all locations. Each physical location should be created only once. If different owners and managers are involved per location or for sets of locations, we suggest using Business Accounts.

Once the AdWords accounts are linked to your shared Google My Business account, the locations will be available as feed items in AdWords. You are responsible for creating a CustomerFeed and using an appropriate matching function to make sure only locations that actually belong to the customer are linked to their related AdWords account. You can use CampaignFeeds or AdGroupFeeds for additional filtering based on campaigns or ad groups.

The best way to filter locations from a shared Google My Business account is to create location labels through the Google My Business API and use a matching function that uses these labels for selection. For example, you can label each location with its AdWords Customer ID in Google My Business and use these Customer ID labels for filtering in AdWords. Or you can label each location with a unique ID, as long as you keep track of these IDs.

Please see our guide for managing location extensions for further details, which also includes an end-to-end code example.

Migration of existing location extensions
If you are using manual location extensions through the AdWords API, we recommend migrating your locations to Google My Business before March 31, 2016. After this date, the creation of manual location extensions will sunset. All unmigrated locations stored in AdWords will be auto-migrated to Google My Business at a later date. Further details about the timeline and process will be announced in this blog.

Timo Bozsolik, AdWords API Team

Update: All new location extensions created on or after October 16th, 2014 can only be created as new account-level feed-based location extensions.

On July 14th, 2014, AdWords announced upgraded location extensions, a more efficient way to manage and use business locations in ads by linking Google My Business and AdWords accounts.

The upgrade is taking place in phases for AdWords accounts throughout the coming months. The next phase of account upgrades is scheduled to start on August 25, 2014. All AdWords accounts will to be upgraded by November, 2014.

The upgrade has direct impact to AdWords API client applications. If you are using the CampaignAdExtensionService to manage LocationExtensions or LocationSyncExtensions, then you’re using the legacy location extensions that are being phased out. After an account is upgraded, you’ll need to use the new account-level feed-based location extensions.

How will existing location extensions be upgraded by Google?

Please review the AdWords Help Center article for all upgrade scenarios. For AdWords API developers, most accounts will fall into one of these scenarios:

• Accounts that don’t have any existing legacy location extensions.
• Accounts that have existing legacy location extensions not sourced from a Google My Business account (i.e., using LocationExtensions only).
• Accounts that have existing legacy location extensions sourced from a Google My Business account (i.e., using LocationSyncExtensions).

If you programmatically create AdWords accounts that are not associated with any user, please get in touch with your Google representative for migration support.

Accounts that don’t have any existing legacy location extensions

For accounts that aren’t using any LocationExtensions or LocationSyncExtensions but will begin using location extensions, you should use feed-based location extensions instead.

Accounts that have existing legacy location extensions not sourced from a Google My Business account

If you’re using LocationExtension entities to manage individual locations, the automatic upgrade process will perform the following:

1. A Google My Business account will be created and linked with the AdWords account. All administrators of that AdWords account will have access to locations in the linked Google My Business account.
2. A CustomerFeed with the Location placeholder type will be created.
3. Existing locations in LocationExtension entities will be copied into the Google My Business account. Existing LocationExtension entities will then be removed.
4. Ads in all campaigns will be served with locations from the linked Google My Business account (you can create a CampaignFeed to further filter or disable location extensions served for a given campaign).

Accounts that have existing legacy location extensions sourced from a Google My Business account

If you’re using LocationSyncExtension to link campaigns to a Google My Business account, then the automatic upgrade process will perform the following:

1. The campaign-level links to the Google My Business account will be switched to a single link at the account level.
   • A CustomerFeed with the Location placeholder type will be created for the account.
2. Any existing LocationExtension entities will be removed, so make sure they’re copied to the linked Google My Business account before the upgrade.
3. Ads in all campaigns will be served with locations from the linked Google My Business account (you can create a CampaignFeed to further filter or disable location extensions served for a given campaign).

If an AdWords account is already linked to Google My Business at the account level using CustomerFeed, any existing legacy location extensions will be removed during the upgrade process.

How do I know if an account has been upgraded?

An account is considered upgraded if either condition is true:

1. It has a CustomerFeed for the Location placeholder type. You can query CustomerFeedService to check:

   select FeedId, PlaceholderTypes where PlaceholderTypes = 7
   

2. It has neither a CustomerFeed nor legacy LocationExtension or LocationSyncExtension entities.

In an upgraded account, any attempts to create legacy location extensions using the CampaignAdExtensionsService will return the AdExtensionError.INVALID_ADEXTENSION_TYPE error.

How do I continue to manage locations?

There’s currently no API support for Google My Business. Locations are managed via the Google My Business Locations interface, which supports bulk management.

Can I start using upgraded location extensions before an account is upgraded?

Since the upgrade process is complicated for many accounts, the simplest approach is to allow accounts using legacy location extensions to be automatically upgraded (account owners will be notified 30 days before the upgrade).

What about reporting?

For upgraded accounts, you’ll need to use the Placeholder Feed Item Report rather than the Ad Extensions Performance Report to download statistics for each location.

We are here to help

If you have any questions about this upcoming change or anything else related to the AdWords API, please contact us on the AdWords API forum or via the Google Ads Developers Google+ page.

- Ray Tsang, AdWords API Team