Google is about to transition local business ads in advertisers’ AdWords accounts to ads that are compatible with the location extensions the company introduced last year.

"This feature allows you to include information such as your business name, address and phone number in your existing text ads," explains Emily Williams of Google’s Inside AdWords crew. "When a potential customer performs a search, their location or search terms are dynamically matched to your business locations, and your most relevant location appears within your ad on Google.com and Google Maps."

"We’ve heard from many of you who’ve already switched to location extensions that campaign management and attracting customers in your area is now simpler and more effective," she says. "With location extensions, you can deliver more exposure and local relevance by using the same ads for all your business locations without the overhead of maintaining a different ad for each location."

Google is offering the options to upgrade your local business ads to text ads with location extensions, and to automatically transition your local business ads.

There is a step-by-step guide here that walks you through the transition process. You can organize your addresses, choose relevant landing pages, connect your addresses with AdWords, review your existing local business ads and create new ones, and review your geo-targeting settings.

Original local business ads will be deleted and recreated as location extensions with specific address overrides after the transition, so stats will be reset to zero.