In recent announcements, it has been made clear that Google intended to incorporate maps into the search network. This has now become a reality as the “next generation” of local search ads are due to start appearing on Google Maps. This will count for all the app, mobile and desktop versions.

The new ads will see brand logos appearing on the map itself, rather than just in the sidebar as has been so far. So when you searched for something you might see the B&Q logo appear on the map within a little circle. This will make it stand out over the rest, drawing the eye and the attention with greater effect than ever before.

Google Maps have over 1.5 billion worldwide users and almost a third of all mobile searches are map searches and this is growing 50% faster than overall searches. Stepping onto this trend Google is working on new ad formats to further take advantage. Promotion pins are another feature we are due to see soon. Aimed mostly at high street stores, this feature will allow special offers in store to display on the map, making it more likely that someone will visit your shop!

Furthermore, there are forthcoming changes to Google Business Pages which will again allow promotions to be highlighted and for customers to search through stock inventories directly via the Google page without having to enter the company website. Speeding up the search and improving the likelihood of them coming to the shop.

The way text ads display is also changing. In order to make them more prominent, they are set to get a double headline with more characters, with the descriptions also getting a character limit boost. Both of which are designed to make them stand out, take up more of the page and increase the chances of them being clicked on.

In testing Google noticed that this increased CTR (click through rate) by as much as 25%, which is a vast improvement. The other reasons cited for the increase is that it makes the description of the ad more flexible and more descriptive, improving the quality of click throughs and resulting in better qualified traffic.

The expanded descriptions beneath the headings have increased from 70 to 80 characters. Not a major increase but enough of one for additional wording to be added into the description. The display URL is also due to be removed, making more space again but making the ad more relevant without the inclusion of a domain name. This has also proven to increase CTR.

One especially clever feature that will start to be introduced soon is in-store-conversion trackers. This is designed to help quantify your AdWords spend vs conversions helping bridge the gap between digital and physical by helping to measure in-store conversions.

How will it do this? Well, what will happen is the customer who searches using Google maps will have their phone location history checked to confirm that they searched for you and then came to into your store. Showing you that your Google AdWords campaign produced a physical sale, or at the very least, a physical visit from the customer. Google’s examples have so far shown that tracked conversions yielded 25 times the ROI that would otherwise have been reported via the AdWords account.

A new rollout which is designed to make things easier and simpler for marketers are new Responsive Display Ads. Soon you’ll simply provide Google with an image, a headline, a target URL and a description and Google will do the rest for you.

It will create a responsive ad for you, this will mean that they’re better able to adapt to the site they’re showing on and remove the need to develop multiple ads for the same campaign. The intention is that it will reshape and resize your ad for all the different layout formats – skyscraper, leaderboard, square, rectangle and so on. The aim is to remove the hassle from the marketer, making you more likely to post more ads, more often. If Google is figuring out the best display for your ad depending on where it is being served, that frees you up to make more ads!