Google Ads on Monday introduced two features aimed squarely at multi-location retailers, restaurants, and local service businesses: a Performance Max toggle called Local Customer Optimization, and a coming Store Sales integration inside Data Manager. Ginny Marvin, Google Ads Liaison, announced both on social media, framing the timing as arriving “ahead of the holiday rush.”

The toggle is the more immediately usable of the pair. Enabled inside a Performance Max campaign configured for store goals, it instructs Google’s bidding system to concentrate budget on people the company’s help documentation describes as “actively navigating, trip-planning, or searching for locations” across Google Maps, Waze, and local formats on Google Search. Marvin’s framing was blunter: reach shoppers “right when they’re actively in-market nearby.”

There’s a catch worth reading twice. Per Google’s support page, Local Customer Optimization “is not compatible with online campaign goals and Performance Max campaigns with products from Merchant Center.” Search Engine Journal notes the practical consequence: retailers already running feed-based Performance Max can’t flip the switch on what they’ve. They’d need to stand up a separate store-goals campaign to use it at all.

The second announcement, Store Sales in Data Manager, is the more consequential one for anyone who cares about measurement. It’s expected to begin rolling out at the end of September, and it lets eligible advertisers pipe in-store revenue into Google Ads by connecting a CRM or Google Sheet directly inside Data Manager, bypassing the Google Ads API or an approved partner. First-party data has to be hashed before upload, and Google limits access to eligible or allowlisted advertisers, so it isn’t universally available.

Search Engine Land reads the pair as bookending the local funnel: one directs spend toward nearby in-market consumers, the other feeds the resulting store revenue back for measurement and Smart Bidding. That’s the structural read. The cultural read is that Google is quietly rewiring how small operators buy foot traffic in a quarter where the platform is also an opening between keyword campaigns and A.I. Mode ads and executing a broader shift toward billing small businesses for missed calls starting October 1.

Two announcements, one direction of travel. The toggle is a gift to small operators who wanted the AI to focus. The measurement piece, gated by allowlist, is where the leverage actually lives, and Google decides who gets in.

Sources