What are Coupons?

Coupons are printable forms, which can be used by businesses to give their customers discounts. Here’s an example:

There are many sites available where you can download and/or print free coupons. In Google Maps a link to the coupons will show up in the search results.

Last year Google partnered with Valpak, a direct marketing company in North America. They started with about 20.000 coupons from Valpak. After the initial release of the Coupons feature more coupons would be added both through Valpak and the Local Business Center.

How can Coupons be created?

I thought there was only one method to create your own coupons, but I think I found another one, more about that one later on.

Business owners in the US can go to their Local Business Center and click on the Coupons tab .

When you click on the Add a coupon now button, you’ll get a form with which you can add your own coupon.

When you start filling out the form, there’s a live preview of the coupon at the right side of the page. The fields are self-explaining. The fields are a little bit small (25 characters for the headline, 35 for the sub-heading, etc), so you have to be creative with texts. You also have the option to give an expiration date to the coupon.

After you’ve clicked on ‘Continue’, the coupon will show up on the detailed page for your listing in Google Maps within a few minutes.

You can edit the Coupons from this overview, but you can also delete or pause them.

Google Coupon Feed

When I started doing some research for this article, I ran into the Google Coupon Feed Documentation.

It looks like this is a way to add a complete list of coupons at once. You have to create an xml feed (or a tsv feed) on your own server. The documentation doesn’t mention how Google will find this feed. Can you submit the url somewhere? Do you need to add it to your sitemap? I asked Google about this, but I haven’t had an answer yet. If I hear from them, I’ll post an update. If you know more about this subject, please let me know

I also couldn’t find any information about the Coupon feeds, except the documentation on code.google.com.

Coupons availability

At this moment the Coupons option is only available in the US, but I’m not sure how many companies are using it.

The initial 20.000 looks like a lot, but I had to perform a couple of searches before I could find one.

Maybe if the coupons start showing up in the ‘normal’ Google search results, more companies will start creating them.

It would also be nice if the feature would be made available in more countries. And if you don’t need to print out the coupons, but just use them on your mobile, like Cellfire offers.

At this moment it’s not possible to search for coupons, that’s a pity.

But for local companies in the States it’s nice to start experimenting with Coupons. It’s free and it gives you an extra option to connect to your customers.

This was the last ‘normal’ article in the series about How to get your information into Google Maps

There will be one more, this will be a wrap up of the series.

Another way of adding information into Google Maps is by creating your own data sources. There are a few different ways of doing this and this article shows you how.

KML

All solutions are based on the fact that Google started indexing KML files. The exact moment they started doing this is unknown, but the first public announcement was begin this year when Google started encouraging users to create KML files and link these in their sitemaps.

After this KML support was showing up everywhere:

• KML search in Google Earth.
• KML and GeoRSS Support Added to the Google Maps API

And the latest news about KML support was last month, when Google announced MyMaps. The biggest news in this announcement wasn’t about creating your own maps, but about searching user generated content:

The user-created results include KML as well as maps made through My Maps.

All KML files Google finds when crawling the web, can be searched from Google Maps! So it’s interesting to find out how you can create your own KML files.

Manually

Because KML is ‘just’ an xml format, you could create it with a normal text or xml editor.

Here’s a very simple example:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<kml xmlns="http://earth.google.com/kml/2.1">
  <Placemark>
    <name>Million Pieces</name>
    <description>This is my location</description>
    <Point>
      <coordinates>
        4.99941388888889,52.35555555555555,0
      </coordinates>
    </Point>
  </Placemark>
</kml>

You could use this option for one location or maybe a few locations. But if you need to add more locations, or if you want to use more advanced KML-features, it’s better to use one of the other options.

Google Earth

Google Earth is all about KML. The name, ‘Keyhole Markup Language’ refers to the Keyhole company which originally created the Google Earth application (name of the application was Keyhole). Most of the data used in Google Earth is stored as KML. This includes the default layers, the layers you can download from the internet.

Besides viewing KML files, it’s also very easy to create your own KML files with Google Earth.

First start the program and go to a place you want to mark. You can find a place by manually searching the globe using your mouse, you can search for an address using the ‘fly to’ option or you can find a business location by using the ‘find business’ option.

If you found the correct location, use the ‘add placemark’ button from the toolbar.

In the window you’ll get next, you can add the the name and description for the marker. You can also change some other properties, eg color of the icon and the color of the label.

The same way you can also add polygons, paths and image overlays.

When you’re finished, you can save the marker by right clicking on the location in My Places and select ‘save as’. This file needs to be placed somewhere on a webserver, but more about this later on in this article.

If you want to create a kml file which contains multiple markers, overlays, polygons, etc you’d better start by creating a folder under ‘My Places’. Place all the markers in this folder and select ‘save as’ on the folder.

Google MyMaps

About a month ago Google announced the MyMaps feature.

This feature allows users to create custom maps. But even more important, every created map is accessible as a kml file and is also being indexed by Google. So your maps can show up in the search result of a Google Maps search.

To create your own map, you’ll need an Google account. If you have one go to maps.google.com. If you don’t have a Google account you can also use this link, here you’ll find more information about creating an account.

On the homepage of Google Maps, there’s tab named ‘My Maps’, it’s next to the ‘Search Results’ tab.

Here you can create a new map and give it a title and description. You can also make it public or unlisted. Public maps will be included in the search results on Google Maps (and Google Earth).

You can add placemarkers, lines and shapes to your newly created map and give these a title and description. The description can be normal text, but also html. It’s even possible to include flash videos.

Save your map and you’re done. The map will be automatically indexed by Google.

Mashup

This is a completely different approach than the onces discussed before.

You can use the Google Maps API to create your own Mashup.

Google Maps mashups are a great way of adding information on a map to your own website. If you have location related information stored in a database it’s easy to publish on a map with the Google Maps API, but it’s also not too difficult to create a KML file with the same information. This way you can make sure the information is not only displayed on your own website, but it’ll also be indexed by Google. How Google finds your kml file? Keep on reading.

Sitemap

A sitemap is an xml file¹ which contains a list of pages that are available on a website for crawling. It is a list of urls with some metadata about the urls (change frequency, last modified, etc).

Sitemaps are supported by all major search engines and are even auto discoverable. Just upload the file to your server, add the location to your robots.txt and the crawlers will find it.

If you have a kml file you can upload it to your website and add the url to your sitemap, like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
   <url>
      <loc>http://millionpieces.nl/mylocations.kml</loc>
      <lastmod>2007-05-10</lastmod>
      <changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
   </url>
</urlset>

Next time Google downloads your sitemap file, the KML file wil also be scheduled for indexing.

Future

At this moment Google is the only search engine that indexes KML files. Maybe in the future others will follow (especially those with their own local search or maps).

At this moment KML is the only geo related format Google indexes, at least that I’m aware of. The Google Maps API and the Google Maps website also support the GeoRSS format. GeoRSS information can be displayed on the Google Maps website and on your own Mashups by using the Google Maps API, so it’s not unthinkable Google will start indexing these also.

This was supposed to be the last article in the series about how to get your information into Google Maps, but I think I’ll write 2 more. The next one will be about Coupons and the last one will be a summary of all articles.

If you have any questions or comments, you can use the feedback form on the contact page (comments will be enabled very soon!).

¹ It can also be a text file, but the features of a text file are limited

First a note. I wanted to test the Local ads before writing about it. Unfortunately I don’t have a campaign suitable for local ads at the moment. All information found in this article is from research I’ve done. When I do have a local campaign running, I’ll probably write a follow up.

What is a local business ad?

From the Google AdWords FAQ:

“Local business ads are AdWords ads associated with a specific geographical location.”

There are 2 different types of local ads:

1. Local AdWords Ads – These are just like normal AdWords ads, but targeted geographically. These will be shown next to the search results on Google Maps as ‘sponsored links’.
2. Local business ads – These are ads which will also be shown next to the search results, but they also includes a map component.

Local Adwords Ads

There are two places where local ads can be displayed. The first one is at the top of the Google Maps search results:

The maximum number of ads displayed at this location is 1.

The second location where local ads can be displayed is at the bottom of the search results:

There’s a maximum of 3 ads displayed here.

These types of ads could also show up in the normal Google search results as sponsored links. However using the same keywords on Google Maps as on the websearch doesn’t result in the same sponsored links. More about this later on in ‘When will ads be displayed’.

Local Business Ads

These kind of ads can also show up at the top or bottom of the search results, but there’s a major difference. When you click on a normal sponsored link you’ll go to a website. When you click on a local business ad you’ll get an info window on the map.

This info window displays a title (name of the company), max 2 text lines, phone number, url, address info and even an image.

The text lines and the image are the only things you can add when creating the ad, the rest of the information is the same as your business information in Google Maps.

As you can see, the marker icon on the map is different from the normal search results markers. You can use your own icon when creating your Local Business ad.

Google only charges you when people click on the link to your website. You don’t have to pay when people are viewing the info balloon.

The local business ads can also show up in the normal web search results. When they do they will almost look the same as they do on Google Maps. The only differences: there’s no image included and the city of your business will also be displayed.

There are two more places where text version of local business ads may appear.

The first one is with relevant searches on the mobile version of Google Maps. Because there’s not much space on a mobile screen, the ad only contains two lines of text, so the ads are shortened. At this moment you’re not charged when people view or click on your ads on Google Maps for Mobile!

The second one is on Google SMS queries. The space in SMS messages is very limited, so the local business ads will also be shortened (Business name and contact info will always be included).

How to create?

There are a few requirements for creating local business ads:

1. You must have a Google Maps business listing
2. Your business must be located in United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, or Spain (others will follow).
3. You must have an AdWords account

For a complete overview of the requirements see the Google AdWords Help Center.

If you want to create a local AdWords campaign, there’s a great lesson in the Google AdWords Learning Center: Language & Location Targeting

When will ads be displayed?

The answer to this question depends on whether you’re searching Google Maps or searching the web.

On Google Maps ads will be displayed when a user submits a search query for a specific geographical area (when there are ads for this area). For local business ads this means the businesses must be located in that area. For local AdWords ads this means there must be a geographically targeted campaign. The user’s IP address isn’t used by the algorithm to decide which ads must be displayed.

On Google’s websearch the user’s IP address is used by the algorithm. A text-only version of the local business ad will show up when the user’s IP address is located near your business. Of course the search query must also contain relevant keywords to your business ad.

If a users uses the name of a city in the query, the IP address isn’t used and ads wil be displayed that are relevant to the city the user searches for. More information about this subjects can be found in the AdWords Help Center.

If you want to test whether your ads are showing in other geographical locations you can use the adpreview tool. Read more about the parameters you can use for testing your ads.

Conclusion

Geographically targeted AdWords campaigns are well known, but the local business ads are relatively unknown, eg I never saw one in the Dutch version of Google Maps.

It’s a great option for companies with physical locations, eg. hotels, restaurants, car sales companies, etc.

Companies who don’t have a physical location, can use geographically targeted AdWords. This way they can still have ads running on Google Maps.

Next episode in this series will be about user (or company) generated content and Google Maps.

Writing the last two articles about Local Ads and User Generated Content is taking longer than I thought it would take. Especially the one about Local Ads.

The local features of Adwords are difficult to test just for the sake of an article, without running a real campaign.

So keep your eyes posted on this blog, next week the last 2 articles will be published.

In the mean time, if you’re Dutch, you may wanna check out the Dutch version of this series. It’s not just a translated version, but it will also be adapted to the Dutch Google Maps (if possible and needed).

General

Let’s start with some general information about the Local Business Center.

The Local Business Center is a tool for business owners to maintain their business information in Google Maps. You can add your address, contact information, a description, opening hours, payment types, etc.

In the US you can also directly edit the information already listed on the Map, in Canada and the UK you have to contact the original source of the data. In the Netherlands I couldn’t find an option to edit the existing information.

Depending on the country you’re in, it can take a while before your information will show up in the search results. More about this later on.

How to use the business center?

Before you can use the business center you need a Google Account. Go to the Local Business Center. If you already have an account, make sure you’re logged in. Otherwise you can create an account on this page.

If you’re in the US and want to change the information already listed on the map, go to maps.google.com and find your business. At the bottom of the ‘more info’ page you’ll find a link add/edit Your Business.

If you want to create a new listing, go to the Local Business Center and click on the new listing link. You’ll get this form:

After you’ve added the basic information, you’ll be guided through a six steps process of adding your information.

1. Edit Listing – Here you can add additional information like mobile phone, email address, website, description, opening hours, etc. You can also correct the Marker if it wasn’t correctly placed on the map!

2. Choose categories – Just fill in some categories for your company and Google tries to find the best match, or leave it empty and you can select categories from a list.

There’s a maximum of five categories. You have to choose them carefully, because these will be used by Google to index your information.

3. Custom Attributes – Depending on the categories you’ve chosen in the previous step, there will already be some custom attributes listed, eg Price Type, Areas Served. But you can also create your own.

These attributes will be shown in your information on the map. I’m not sure whether or not this information will be used in the search.

4. Add Images – You can upload a maximum of ten images related to your business, eg your logo, pictures of the office, pictures of hotel rooms, etc.

Be creative, because this can make your information more attractive than others without images.

5. Preview – This is the final preview, so take a careful look if all the information is correct. You can change information later on, but it’s better to have correct information listed from the start.

Don’t forget to read Google’s terms of services before clicking the ‘Continue’ button.

6. Listing Saved – Now all you can do is wait for the PIN to arrive by mail, ie a real postcard delivered by the postman This will take about 10 days in the US (maybe a fews days more outside the US).

note: there also appears to be a phone verification system in the US and Canada, but I haven’t tested it, so I can’t tell you how this works.

If you view your business information in the Local Business Center, the status will be something like ‘waiting for PIN verification’.

If you get the PIN you can enter it and after this, you’ll have to wait a while (24 hours in the US, max 6 weeks in the Netherlands, not sure about other countries, probably somewhere in between) before the information appears in the search results.

Bulk upload

Since a few weeks there’s a new option to add information, bulk upload. This is very useful for businesses with many locations.

Very special about this option is there’s no PIN verification needed! The information will however take between hours an six weeks to appear into Google Maps.

Click on the ‘Upload a data file’ link to start. Here you can upload your file. There are three different types of files you can upload:

1. Complete – a complete list of all businesses, will overwrite all previous information.
2. Addition – list will be added, current listed businesses won’t be affected.
3. Deletion – listed businesses will be deleted.

Here’s a comprehensive guide how to create the bulk files.

Problems

My own listing is still waiting on the next update and I’m curious what will happen with the information already listed. This information is from the Chamber of Commerce. Will there be two listings, maybe the Chamber of Commerce one will be delete, will they be merged? I guess I have to wait and see.

If you have questions or run into problems you can go to the Maps Help or ask your question in the Google Maps Help Group. You can also contact me (you can also use this contact form if you want to comment on this article).

This article was about how to get your business information into Google Maps for free. Next article will be about Google Maps and Adwords.

The biggest difference between the webcrawling results and 3rd party sources is the structure of the data. 3rd Party sources know what the address fields are, how the extra data like reviews is structured, etc. While data from the crawlers isn’t structure at all, as we saw in the previous post.

Types of data

Google made deals with various types of local data providers. Because it’s ‘local’ data, most of these 3rd parties are only active in a specific country. Because of this Google has to make deals for every country and every type of data they want to include on their maps.

Some of the sources provide basic information, others are more specialized on a certain subject or a certain region.

Basic information

Basic information includes name, address and contact information. Google gets this data from general business information providers.

A few examples of these providers are the Chamber of Commerce (Netherlands), Yell.com (UK), YellowPages.ca (Canada), but also publicly available Yellow Pages directories in the US.

Specialized information

Google also uses specialized directory services like directories about hotels, restaurants, tourist information, public transport, etc.

These specialized sources provide basic information about one subject (eg. restaurants), but most of them also provide extra information like user reviews, pricing information and opening hours.

Examples of specialized directories are: Iens.nl, dinnersite.nl, holland.com (Netherlands), toptable.co.uk, restaurant-guide.com (UK), allmenus.com and opentable.com (US).

Regional information

For some areas Google also uses data providers that are only covering a certain region, eg a city.

Examples of these sources are nymag.com, NewYorkCity.com (NY – US), Viewlondon.co.uk (London – UK). I haven’t found examples for this on the maps for the Netherlands, but maybe these will be added in the future.

Your own information

So how can you make sure Google knows about your information? You have to find out which sources Google uses and submit your data to these sources.

Unfortunately Google doesn’t disclose which 3rd party sources they are using, so you’ll have to find them yourself. Search for similar companies on Google Maps, click on the more info link and check the sources in the info balloon (under the ‘Details’ or ‘Reviews’ tab).

You can use this information to find out where to submit your own data to (in the screenshot above that would be aol.com’s citysearch, opentable.com and gayot.com)

Nice thing about adding information to these directories is that your general findability will become better, not only on Google Maps.

You have to remember it’ll probably take a long period (6 weeks) before your data will show up in Google Maps.

Reviews

Some of the 3rd party information you can’t change, edit or delete and that are the user reviews and the information on other websites about your company. But this is also true for general search engines.

The only thing you can do is trying to deliver the best quality you can. But also respond to user reviews. Let users know you’re reading them and you’re trying to act on them (if necessary).

You can also add your own business information directly to Google, but that’s the subject for next article in this series.

Disclaimer: There are more sites Google is using than the onces named above, these are examples so you can get an idea of which local sources Google is using.

This post is about the business data Google gets by crawling the Internet and the use of addresses on your website.

Webcrawler

Google says they are using information they get from their crawlers. I’m not sure whether they are really searching the web for addresses, or they are only using the crawl results to be displayed in the ‘webpages’ tab of the balloon you’ll get when you click on the ‘more info’ link in the Google Maps search results.

HTML address tag

Searching for addresses can be difficult. There’s an address html tag, but what’s inside the address tag, isn’t defined. So if Google uses the information from the address tags they find, they have to use a lot of intelligence to find the correct address.

hCard

Another way of adding address information to your website is using the hCard Microformat specification, like I did on my contact page:

<div class="vcard">
  <span class="fn org">Million Pieces</span>
  <div class="adr">
    <div class="street-address">Kiekstraat 167</div>
      <span class="postal-code">1087 GT</span>
      <span class="locality">Amsterdam</span>
    <div class="country-name">Nederland</div>
  </div>
  <div class="tel">
    <span class="type">work</span>
    <span class="type">cell</span>
    <span class="type">pref</span>
    <span class="value">+31 6 18376041</span>
  </div>
  <a class="email"
href="mailto:info@millionpieces.nl">info@millionpieces.nl</a>
</div>

hCard is a specification which can be used to add structured (and semantically correct) address information to webpages.

Although I’m not aware Google is using hCard to search for addresses at this moment, I think it’s important to use it on your website. Why? There are a few reasons:

1. Google may start using them – Will this happen soon? I don’t know, but if it happens you can be prepared for it.
2. Other search engines may start using them – Technorati is already experimenting with a specialized search engine for microformats. You can use it to search for contact information.
3. Browser plugins can recognize hCard information – There’s a great microformats plugin for Firefox called Operator.

Conclusion: if you have address information on your website, why not use hCard?

This post turned out to be a microformats promotion talk, but next installment will be more about Google Maps. It’ll talk about the 3rd party data sources Google uses.

What the sources are for the information Google displays on the maps isn’t very clear to a lot of people.

At last week’s Geo Developer day I also discovered not a lot of people know how they can control their own information on the maps by using the Google Local Business center.

In this series of posts I’ll write about the sources Google uses and ways how to add or edit your own information.

First let’s start with an introduction.

What is Google Maps?

When people are talking about Google Maps, they can be talking about two different kind of things. The first one is the website maps.google.com. The second one are the maps you can add to your own website with the use of the Google Maps API. In this series I’m talking about the first one.

Google Maps can be used to view satellite images of all around the world. For some countries there’s detailed map information available (eg. streetnames) and for others there’s even more information available about local businesses and other local information.

Google Maps can be used in these countries as a local search engine, but also as a route planner. Questions as: “How to get from address a to address b?”, “Where’s the nearest Mexican restaurant?”, “What web development companies are there in this city?”, and even more can be answered by using Google Maps.

Where is Google Maps available?

Google is rapidly expanding the number of countries where localized information is available. At this moment full functionality is available in: Australia, Canada, China, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Spain, the UK, and the United States. Japan has almost full functionality (there are no driving directions in the Japanese Maps). For other countries there’s map data available or only satellite imagery. See the Maps help, for more information about the availability of data.

Where does Google gets the data from?

This is the main question I want to answer in this series. I don’t think my answer(s) will be complete as Google isn’t very open about their sources. But I hope the information in upcoming articles will help people and companies to understand how they can control or at least influence the data that is shown on the map.

Here’s a list of topics I’m gonna write about. Each topic corresponds with a source for the data in Google Maps.

1. Webcrawler
2. Local data suppliers
3. Local Business Center
4. Google Adwords
5. KML sitemap User generated data
6. Coupons

There will be links to the separate articles as the series grows. This will happen in the next few days.