Small businesses with many retail locations face unique challenges with tracking the results of their Pay Per Click campaigns.

Geo-targeting internet marketing campaigns can work — but up to a point. Google now has new features to help track results of Pay Per Click campaigns with a little bit more accuracy — allowing our crack team (okay — we’ll call them very talented) of online marketing specialists here to tweak campaigns and provide valuable marketing intelligence to our clients.

First: a little explanation about the differences between Google Places and Google extensions. With a Google Places account, a small business with a geographic location (ie: a store or office) can appear for free on Google maps. Google Places will help feature a business’s address, phone number and other interesting tidbits about a business — without charge.

A Google address extension is a feature added on to text Google Pay Per Click ads. There is no additional cost to this feature (yet), which allows you to type in the addresses of up to 10 business locations in an ad. We use this feature for our Phoenix online marketing clients who might have multiple locations in the Phoenix valley. We set the geo-targeting for the greater Phoenix DMA, and then include the addresses of each store location. We can set certain ad text to appear with only certain location addresses — a feature that will be handy for tweaking location-centered marketing campaigns.

If someone, for example, located in the Scottsdale area types in a request for “doggie day care”, an ad with a Scottsdale location extension will appear.

Alternatively, we can link up a client’s Google places account — which has all the store information information already loaded up in it — to the Google extensions feature in the PPC account.

But how to measure the results? Two ways: through Google Places and Google AdSense.

You can track basic impressions and clicks with your Google Places account dashboard (see below).

With Google AdSense, you can track actual conversions (ie — how many people downloaded a coupon, made an actual sale or filled out a lead form) and track that to a location listing.

Smart digital marketing specialists can take advantage of this feature to tweak campaigns, using the metrics as a guide.

A typical example:

An analysis of a Pay Per Click campaign for a chain of hair salons show that some locations get a lot of interest in hair weaves. We know that because we have posted hair weave coupons up on the client’s site and attached conversion tracking tags on the coupon to see who is downloading the coupons. It turns out that two of the hair salons on the east side of Phoenix attract the majority of coupon downloaders for hair weaves.

Using that information, we then revised the campaign. An additional campaign and ad group was created for hair weaves — with ad text featuring the coupon. Only specific store locations were featured in the extensions for this campaign. Voila! A happy client who booked a lot more hair weave sessions.