14 DAY TRIAL // Google has been driving up efforts to cater to the small business and hyper-local market. The company makes billions of dollars from online advertising, but the local market still holds a huge potential. Google is now introducing a new self-serve ad campaign manager for businesses using Places.
"Today, we’re announcing the availability of a new online advertising solution to help local businesses connect with potential customers in their area," Kiley McEvoy, Product Manager at Google, wrote.
"Boost enables business owners to easily create online search ads from directly within their Google Places account. No ongoing management is needed after the initial set up," he added.
Google Boost is a way for the company to ensure that even people with very little experience in online advertising and which may not want or afford to hire outside consultants, can create a Google ad campaign. These ads will show up in local searches on the main search engine or Maps.
These small businesses don't have to worry about keywords, bidding or anything like that. If they already have a profile set up for Places, they're half way there.
All users need to provide is their monthly budget and choose a business category. Google Boost will then automatically choose the best keywords and bidding strategy for the advertiser.
Users will only pay when someone clicks on the ads and there will be a way of tracking the ad's performance.
Google Boost is in a beta phase and is only available to select businesses in San Francisco, Houston and Chicago. Business owners which have been selected to be eligible to sign up for Boost will be notified in their account dashboard.
The company plans to expand the program based on the performance of this initial test.
The tool could prove a very good move by Google and could bring in a lot of new business in the very coveted local space. Facebook is a prime competitor in this space, even though the two companies are going about it very differently.