According to Google Trends data from the month of March, search queries that contain a location qualifier like “nearby” or “near me” have doubled int he past year. Unsurprisingly, 80 percent of these searches have come from mobile devices. With the ever increasing use of mobile devices, it’s easy to see how often “nearby” and “near me” variations of these search queries will appear in Google’s auto-suggest on your phone.
This new mobile ad product that was specifically designed around these types of queries, as well as the data from Google Trends, was first released by Google just last week. In these new Nearby Business listings, the typical copy that is shown in text ads have been stripped out, and now feature buttons to get directions or click to call the searched for business.
Omid Kordestani, Google’s Chief business officer said that a buy button will begin appearing soon on select search ads. You can see what Korestani discussed with ReCode’s Kara Swisher by checking out the live blog coverage on Marketing Land.