Google Ads introduced two features for multi-location retailers, restaurants and local service businesses on 8 September. Ginny Marvin, Google’s Ads Liaison, said the pair is meant to “unite real-time navigation signals on the front end” with offline revenue measurement on the back end, as quoted by Search Engine Roundtable. The first is a toggle called Local customer optimization, inside Performance Max campaigns for store goals. The second will let advertisers connect a CRM or a Google Sheet directly inside Data Manager to feed in-store sales data into reporting and Smart Bidding.
What Is Local Customer Optimization in Performance Max?
Local customer optimization is a feature within Performance Max campaigns for store goals that, per Google’s own help document, lets advertisers “prioritize reaching potential customers who are close to or interested in your business area and ready to take action immediately such as visit or contact.” It works by directing budget toward “locally tailored ads on channels such as Google Maps, Waze and local formats on Google Search,” reaching people as they plan routes or search nearby. It is a toggle inside an existing campaign, not a new campaign type, and it can be switched off again to revert to standard Performance Max behaviour.
The Toggle Doesn’t Stack With What You’re Already Running
The documentation draws two hard lines. Google’s help page states that “Local customer optimization is not compatible with online campaign goals,” and separately, that it cannot be used with “Performance Max campaigns with products from Merchant Center.” Eligible conversion goals: store visits, store sales, and two that the documentation marks Google hosted, contacts and directions. Turning it on means choosing the objective “Local store visits and promotions” at campaign creation, confirming the store conversion goals, and then a “Local customer optimization” panel appears with a toggle, where the advertiser selects business locations from a Business Profile account or from linked location and affiliate location assets, per Search Engine Land’s 12 August coverage. Existing campaigns can enable it under Budget and bidding optimization settings. Neither limit says what happens to a retailer already running a Merchant Center feed through Performance Max; the documentation only rules out combining the two, leaving a separate campaign as the implied route.
One of the named channels is Waze, where Google extended store-goals ad availability beyond the United States earlier this month through a help-page edit rather than an announcement. No source connects the two changes; the overlap is only that Waze is a surface the toggle spends into.
Three Reports, No Single Launch Date
Three trade outlets covered the same announcement within a day of each other and did not agree on when either feature arrives.
| Source | Local customer optimization | Store Sales in Data Manager |
|---|---|---|
| Search Engine Roundtable, 9 Sept | rolling out immediately | coming weeks |
| Search Engine Land, 8 Sept | rolling out now | in the coming weeks |
| Search Engine Journal, 8 Sept | global rollout coming soon | end of September |
Neither of Marvin’s quotes carries a date; the range above comes from trade coverage, not a confirmed schedule.
The Measurement Side Stays Gated
What is actually new is the connection point: advertisers will be able to link a CRM or a Google Sheet directly inside Data Manager instead of building the more technically demanding upload routes documented for the Data Manager API, per Search Engine Land’s coverage of the announcement. That plumbing dates to a 7 May update: per PPC Land’s account of a Google Ads Developer Blog post by Lindsey Volta, Data Manager API v1.6 let a single request replace a multi-job workflow and added a field tying uploaded transactions to a specific store.
The gate around it has not moved. Google’s own store-sales help document, which predates this week’s announcement, opens with a scope note: “This article is intended for advertisers allowlisted to upload store sales data.” Search Engine Journal’s coverage of the Data Manager path restates the same requirements rather than removing them: customer information such as emails, phone numbers and addresses must be hashed before upload, either by the advertiser or by Google Ads using SHA-256, and the capability stays limited to eligible, allowlisted advertisers. No source describes that allowlist being lifted, relaxed or automated by the new connection method.
Google also puts a clock on the data. Reporting values update only from 35 days before the upload date; transactions from the last 14 days are preferred, transactions within 30 days qualify for dynamic conversion value reporting, and anything older than 90 days will not process. A value has to travel from an in-store transaction record into Google’s reporting, hashed, on a schedule, before Smart Bidding can act on it: much the same handoff problem the existing offline-conversion route was built to solve on the click side.
What Changes, and What Doesn’t
The toggle is the visible part: a new campaign setting that points budget at the local surfaces the documentation names, Maps, Waze and local Search formats, and that cannot combine with a product feed or an online goal in the same campaign. The measurement side is narrower than the announcement suggests. The API route for uploading store sales predates the announcement, and the eligibility line in front of it, allowlisted advertisers only, is the same line Google’s documentation carried before 8 September. An advertiser who turns the toggle on is not guaranteed a way to prove what it did.
