Sunsetting manual location extensions from feeds

At the moment, location extensions in AdWords can be sourced from two different places: a Google My Business account that is linked to your AdWords account or - for legacy users - manual location extensions created as feed items in AdWords.

What’s changing?
We’ll sunset manual location extensions on May 20, 2017 for all legacy users. You’ll no longer be able to manually create and manage Feed and FeedItem with a corresponding FeedMapping of placeholderType 7 (location extensions) and placeholderType 77 (location targeting) after this date. Instead, create your locations in Google My Business and link them to your AdWords account as outlined in our Location Extensions guide. You can use the Google My Business API to manage your business locations at scale.

What you should do
Please migrate your code before May 20, 2017 to avoid being impacted by this transition. See our guide for managing location extensions for further details, including an end-to-end code example. We recommend migrating your existing legacy locations alongside your code in order to have full control over your Google My Business account structure, test your setup, and avoid any downtime in location extension management. If you're not concerned about downtime, let us migrate your existing manual location extensions for you (you still have to migrate your code).

Auto-migration
All unmigrated manual location extensions stored in AdWords will be gradually auto-migrated starting from May 22, 2017.
  • For each Customer Account with unmigrated manual location extensions, we'll pick all Manager Accounts at the lowest level of the manager hierarchy.
  • For each such Manager Account, we'll create a single Business Account in Google My Business managed by the administrative users of the original Manager Account and its managers. The name of this Business Account will be ‘AdWords (<cid>)’, where <cid> is the AdWords Customer ID of the original Manager Account.
  • We’ll also create Business Accounts in Google My Business for Customer Accounts not linked to any Manager Account. Those will be managed by the administrative users of the Customer Account.
  • For each unmigrated location in the Customer Account, we'll create a new unverified business location in that Business Account and label it with its AdWords Customer ID. The original manually created feed items representing that location in AdWords will be removed.
  • We'll replace all unmigrated location extension and location targeting feeds with new feeds linked to the shared Business Account created in Google My Business. In each feed, we'll set up a labelFilter based on the Customer ID to map each location to its original account.
  • Any existing CampaignFeed and AdGroupFeed will be recreated to match the original setup, including their matching functions.
If you have questions while you’re upgrading, please reach out to us on the AdWords API forum.