Google Performance Max adds local customer optimization

Google has added a feature called local customer optimization to Performance Max campaigns that use store goals, according to a new Google Ads Help page. When switched on, the setting tells Performance Max to prioritise people who are physically near a location and ready to act, reaching them as they navigate, plan a trip, or search for a nearby business on Google Maps, Waze, and local formats in Google Search. For brands that run store-visit campaigns across many locations, it is a lever that ties ad delivery directly to where customers are and what they are about to do.

What happened

Google documented local customer optimization as a setting inside Performance Max campaigns built for store goals: store visits, store sales, contacts, or directions. Google’s help page describes it as a way to prioritise reaching potential customers who are close to or interested in a business area and ready to take an immediate action such as a visit or a contact. The stated targeting moment is when someone is actively navigating, trip-planning, or searching for a location on Google Maps, Waze, or Google Search.

The feature has two clear boundaries. It works only with offline conversion goals, so a campaign that also carries online goals cannot use it until those are removed. It is also not compatible with Performance Max campaigns that serve products from Merchant Center, which keeps it separate from the shopping-feed side of Google Ads. Advertisers switch it on through a toggle in the Budget and bidding optimization section of campaign settings, either during setup for a new campaign or from the settings page for an existing one.

Why it matters

Local customer optimization is another step in Google routing local demand through Performance Max rather than standalone local campaigns. For a business with physical locations, the promise is sharper timing: reaching a customer in the moment they are heading somewhere or looking for a place to go, across the three surfaces where that intent shows up. The catch is that the targeting is only as good as the location signals Google holds for each store. Store visits, directions, and contacts all depend on Google having an accurate, complete, and current picture of every location.

That dependency is where the feature meets the reality of running at scale. A single-location advertiser can toggle the setting and check one profile. A national chain is asking Google to optimise ad delivery against hundreds or thousands of store records at once, and any gaps in that data, wrong hours, a missing address, a closed location still showing as open, quietly cap what the optimization can do.

What this means for multi-location brands

For a central marketing team, the practical question is not whether to switch on a toggle. It is whether the location data underneath every store-goal campaign is clean enough for Google’s targeting to work. Local customer optimization rewards accuracy: the closer Google’s understanding of each location is to reality, the better it can match a nearby, high-intent customer to the right store. Brands that keep location data consistent and current across the estate give the feature something reliable to optimise against; brands that do not are optimising on top of errors.

The scale also argues for managing this through bulk tooling rather than location by location. Enabling and monitoring the setting across a large estate, and keeping the Business Profile data behind it correct, is work for central campaign management and for API-driven governance of Google Business Profile data, not a per-store checklist. The setting is new, so treat the first weeks as a measurement exercise: watch store visits, directions, and contacts by location, and confirm the lift is real before rolling it out estate-wide.

Local customer optimization prioritises reaching potential customers who are close to, or interested in, a business area and ready to take an immediate action such as a visit or a contact, reaching them as they navigate, plan a trip, or search for a location on Google Maps, Waze, or Google Search.

Google Ads Help, paraphrased from the feature documentation

The bottom line

Google keeps consolidating local advertising into Performance Max, and local customer optimization pushes that automation closer to the physical moment of intent. Multi-location brands that already treat accurate location data as infrastructure are positioned to benefit; the rest will find that the feature can only optimise as well as the data it is fed.