Google Maps is getting adverts: what to sort out now

Imagine somebody sitting in the car, searching Google Maps for a painter nearby. They see three results. Two with photographs, stars and a clear address. And one with a promoted pin at the top, with a strong photograph of the work and a direct action button. Guess which one they tap.

That promoted pin is not you yet. But your competitor may well be, if you do nothing now. In 2026 Google changed something most trades do not have on their radar. Demand Gen adverts, which already exist for online shops and large brands, are coming to Google Maps too. Local businesses such as painting firms, building firms, landscape gardeners and heating engineers can then appear as a promoted pin in the map view itself, while somebody is scrolling around their own area.

Three figures circulate around this subject: 51 per cent of consumers searching for local businesses through Maps, a growth of 400 per cent on searches with near me in them, and 46 per cent local intent. For the first two no source can be found, and the third comes from a presentation by a Google employee in 2018, not from a publication by Google. They have been taken out. What does count: on the map your business stands next to your competitor, and there a photograph and a review score decide it.

Note: linking your Business Profile to your Google Ads account is the preparation that takes the most time. Google nowhere states it as an absolute condition, but without that link a map advert has nothing to point at. Whoever starts now is there first.

Google Demand Gen is an advertising format Google has used for a few years to reach people while they are not actively searching. You know it from Gmail, YouTube and the Discover feed: visual adverts that appear at the moment somebody is browsing, before they type a search term. Already running video on YouTube? Then Maps joins in as a channel that reaches the same people. How often that happens stays in your hands with a frequency goal at group level, so that your budget does not go on repetition to a small group.

On 20 May 2026 Google announced that Demand Gen adverts will appear on Google Maps as well. That announcement does not stand on its own.

Source: Google Ads Help, on Demand Gen campaigns. Google now names Maps there itself among the places where Demand Gen shows. Last checked on 25 August 2026. We deliberately name no roll out moment per country or per account, because Google does not publish that and we cannot establish it from the outside; look in your own account to see whether the channel is there.

In our article on the changes in Google Ads after Google Marketing Live 2026 you can read what else is shifting this year.

What changes in practice: your business can appear as a promoted pin in the Maps Explore view and in nearby suggestions. Those are the suggestions Maps shows when somebody is searching in a particular area. Not because somebody typed your name, but because somebody is looking around Maps in your service area. For a landscape gardener in Bristol that means: if somebody in Bristol scrolls through businesses nearby, your business can appear with a photograph of your work and a button to get in touch directly. That makes Maps a real advertising platform for local trades for the first time. Not through keywords, but through location and audience based reach.

A promoted pin is not a loose picture. It is a combination of your Business Profile and your Google Ads account that together form a complete visual advert, visible to everybody looking around Maps in your service area. The pin holds your business name, a photograph of your work, your average rating, the number of reviews and an action button such as Call now or Directions. Anybody who sees that pin has nothing left to search for. They tap, ring or drive your way.

There are a few technical requirements against that:

• The link: your Business Profile has to be linked to your Google Ads account as a location asset. Without that link you cannot join in, because it is how Google verifies that you really are at that location and that your advert matches reality.
• Creative: at least a landscape photograph of 1200x628 pixels and a square photograph of 1200x1200 pixels. A video of 6 to 30 seconds is optional, but works particularly well for trades. Think of a short clip of a job or a before and after. Through Google Asset Studio, which uses Gemini Omni, you can also have this material generated or improved quickly.
• Budget: you set a daily budget yourself through Google Ads. Google names no minimum budget for this format, so start low and see what it produces.
• Targeting: you set a working radius around your location yourself.

Tip: have a look now at how your current Business Profile appears on Maps. Are your photographs current? Are your address and telephone number right? Your advert gets built on top of that base. In our article on optimising Google Maps for small businesses you can read how to get that base in order.

You do not have to wait until Demand Gen goes live on Maps. In fact: whoever has their foundation in order now can go live among the first as soon as the channel appears in their account. These are the four concrete steps you can take today.

Step 1: link your Business Profile to Google Ads

This is by far the most important step. In your Google Ads account go to Assets, choose Locations and link your Business Profile as a location asset. Without an Ads account you start there first. The link is not technically difficult, but it takes time and a verification step through Google. Set an afternoon aside for it. Doing it the week before launch is how campaigns end up waiting on a verification email.

Step 2: upload good photographs of your work

Maps adverts are visual. The photograph you choose decides whether somebody taps. Do not use stock photographs, a logo or a picture of a van. Take real photographs of your work: a well laid garden, a neatly painted house, a tidily installed bathroom. Most people open Maps on their phone, so the photograph has to look good on a small screen. Make sure you have at least a landscape photograph and a square version of your strongest shot.

Step 3: collect reviews

Put 4.8 stars and 47 reviews on a pin and it convinces far more than a pin with 3 reviews. Reviews partly decide how well your advert performs in Maps and give potential customers immediate confidence. Ask for a review actively after every job. A short message with a direct link to your Business Profile works fine. Do it straight after handover, at the moment the customer is happy, not a week later. One rule that is law in the United Kingdom: since 6 April 2025 writing, commissioning or hosting fake reviews is a banned practice under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024, enforced by the Competition and Markets Authority. So ask, and never buy or swap.

Step 4: set your radius targeting

These adverts work on the basis of location. You decide the radius around your business in which you want to be visible. For most trades that is a working area of 10 to 20 miles. Set it too broadly and you get leads too far away to serve profitably. Too narrowly and you miss chances close to home. Look as well at where your competitors sit and in which areas you already have plenty of work you can build on.

Note: Demand Gen through Maps is a paid feature that runs through Google Ads. Set your budget deliberately and match your bid to what a new customer is worth to you. Start small, test, and scale up when it works.

The same four steps do double duty on the unpaid side of Maps. Ask Maps answers a spoken question with one or two businesses instead of a list of ten, and it reads the same services, photographs and reviews you are sorting out here. What that selection does to a local business, and the checklist that goes with it, is in Ask Maps is coming to the Netherlands.

Every article about a new advertising format tells you what it can do. This part is about the other half, because that is the half that decides whether the money was well spent. Five things a promoted pin does not fix, and it is better to read them before you set a budget than after.

It does not lift your unpaid position on the map. Paying for a pin buys you placement in the advertising slot and nothing else. The ordinary map result underneath keeps behaving exactly as it did: relevance, distance and prominence are what Google names for that, and an advertising budget is not on that list. If your unpaid position was poor on Monday, it is still poor on Friday with a campaign running. The only difference is that you are now visible twice on the days you pay and once on the days you do not.

Nor does it repair a thin profile. The pin is assembled from your Business Profile, as the first figure on this page shows. If there are three photographs in that profile and two of them are of a van, the advert shows a van. Advertising a weak profile is the most expensive way to find out that the profile was weak. Sort out steps 2 and 3 first, then buy the placement.

It does not create demand that is not there. A promoted pin reaches people who are already looking around your area in Maps. In a small town that pool is small, and no budget makes it bigger. Widening the radius to find more people is the usual reflex and it is usually wrong, because the extra people are the ones who live too far away to be worth the drive. A quiet month in a trade is more often a demand problem than a visibility problem, and this format does not solve the first kind.

Nor does it outrun a poor review average. Your rating is on the pin. If it says 3.4, you are paying to show a stranger that you are rated 3.4, next to a competitor showing 4.8 for free. That is the one case where advertising actively works against you, and the fix is not a bigger budget but the review work in step 3.

It stops the day you stop. A paid pin is rent, not property. Everything you build in your profile keeps working when the card is declined; the pin does not. That is not an argument against advertising, it is an argument for doing the unpaid work first, so that the day you pause you are not back at nothing.

Most trades find out whether an advertising campaign worked by asking themselves whether it felt busier. That is not nothing, but it cannot tell you whether to spend the same again next month. For a Maps campaign the measurement is a bit awkward, and it is more honest to say why than to hand you a dashboard and hope.

The two systems that will not agree

You have two sets of figures about the same map pin and they count different things. Your Business Profile has its own performance overview, which counts what people did with your profile: how often it was seen, how often somebody rang, how often somebody asked for directions. Google Ads counts what happened after an advert was shown, inside the conversion actions you set up yourself. The same customer can appear in both, and neither of them knows about the job you eventually invoiced.

So do not try to reconcile the two. Pick one as your working number, write down which one you picked and on what date, and compare it only with itself. A figure you measure the same way every month is worth more than a more accurate figure you measure differently each time.

Take a baseline before you switch anything on

Everybody skips this step, and it is the only one that makes the rest interpretable. Write down, for the four full weeks before your campaign starts, how many calls came in through your profile, how many direction requests, and how many enquiries you got in total from all sources. Keep that note. Without it you will be comparing a good month with a feeling, and every advertising platform in the world wins that comparison.

Ask the question at the door

The cheapest measuring instrument in a trade is a sentence: where did you find us? Ask it on every call for the first two months and write the answer next to the job. It is rough, people misremember, and somebody who saw your pin on Monday and searched your name on Thursday will say they found you on Google. But over fifty calls it tells you something no dashboard does, namely whether the work that arrived was the kind you actually want.

What to judge it on, and when

Judge a Maps campaign on booked work, not on taps. A pin that produces thirty taps and no jobs is worse than one that produces four taps and a bathroom. Give it long enough that seasonality does not decide the answer for you: for most trades that means a full quarter rather than a fortnight, because the gap between the first call and the signed job is measured in weeks. And set the number in advance that would make you stop. Deciding your walk away point while you are still calm is the only part of this that is genuinely easy.

One honest limit to close on. You will not be able to separate cleanly what the paid pin did from what your profile would have done anyway, because both are on the same map in front of the same person. Anyone who promises you that split is selling you a model, not a measurement. What you can establish is whether total enquiries went up, whether the quality held, and whether the cost per booked job stayed under what a customer is worth to you. Three questions, all answerable, and together they are enough to decide.

Maps adverts are new, and new is the most expensive reason to move budget. With a fixed amount to spend on getting found this year, the order below is the one we would defend, and the reasoning matters more than the list.

First, the unpaid base. Steps 2, 3 and 4 from the section above cost you time and no advertising money: real photographs, a review habit, a service area that matches where you will actually drive. Everything paid on this page is built on those three, so buying placement before they are in order means paying to show an unfinished profile to strangers. This is also the only part that keeps running when you stop paying.

Then the search that already exists. Somebody typing emergency plumber and your town has a problem right now and a card in their hand. That intent is the most valuable thing in local advertising and it is the first place a limited budget belongs. The promoted pin reaches people who are looking around rather than looking for you specifically, which is a genuinely different and generally cheaper kind of attention.

Then the local formats that carry a lead guarantee. Where Local Services Ads are available for your trade and your country, they sit closer to a booked job than a display style advert does, because the format itself is built around an enquiry. We wrote up how that format works for trades in a separate article, linked at the foot of this page.

Then Demand Gen on Maps. Not because it is weak, but because it is the one that most rewards a base you have already built. The pin borrows your photographs and your stars; it does not make them. Come to it last and it is a multiplier on work you have already done. Come to it first and it is a bill.

One exception to that order, and it is a real one. If you are new in an area and nobody has ever heard of you, the search demand for your name is zero and the unpaid map result you would be optimising has nothing to sit on yet. In that situation a visual format that shows a stranger a photograph of your work is doing something the other channels cannot do, and moving it up the list is defensible. Just keep the budget small enough that a quiet first quarter does not hurt.

When do Demand Gen adverts on Google Maps go live?

Google announced the extension on 20 May 2026. Maps is by now named in Google's own explanation of Demand Gen among the places where those campaigns show. When the channel appears in your account can differ per account, so check it yourself in Google Ads. The preparation you can do now in any case.

Do I have to be advertising on Google already to join in?

Yes. Demand Gen Maps adverts run through Google Ads. You need an active Google Ads account and your Business Profile has to be linked to that account as a location asset. If you have no Ads account yet, this is the moment to create one. That takes time, so start now rather than just before the launch.

What does advertising on Google Maps through Demand Gen cost?

Google names no minimum budget for this format; you set your daily budget yourself. What you really pay depends on the competition in your area and the targeting you set. Demand Gen adverts are usually charged on impressions or clicks, depending on your campaign settings. Start with a low daily budget, see what it produces and adjust.

Does my Business Profile need photographs for Maps adverts?

Yes, without good photographs you cannot run a Demand Gen advert in Maps. Google asks for at least a landscape photograph of 1200x628 pixels and a square version of 1200x1200 pixels. A video of 6 to 30 seconds is optional but lifts the performance of your advert considerably. Your own photographs of your work perform far better than stock.

Does TheSEO help with setting a Maps campaign up as well?

Yes. Our paid search specialist links your Business Profile to Google Ads, sets the right targeting for your service area and prepares a Demand Gen campaign that can go live as soon as Maps adverts are available. Book a free call and we will work out the best approach for your situation together.

Do you want to read up first? Our knowledge base holds more articles on local visibility, Google Ads and the changing search experience. Do you want us to arrange it? We link your Business Profile, prepare your Demand Gen Maps campaign and make sure you are among the first there as soon as it goes live. Book a call: free introduction, no obligations.