Everything I Know About Apple Maps Ads So Far

Apple launched Apple Maps Ads on 8/25/26. Despite how much that sucks, we digital marketers like nothing more than a new service we can figure out and take advantage of before the rest of the world overruns the barricades. In that spirit, I have dived into Apple Maps Ads with both feet. Here’s what I know so far about how to advertise your business on Apple Maps:

1. How To Set Up An Ad on Apple Maps

   Here’s a video on the first ad I set up for Sidetrack Bar & Grill in Pleasanton, CA:

   I am not going to go into every detail – it’s pretty easy, but here are some things to keep in mind:

   – If you are an agency, you first need to set up an Agency account in Apple Maps. Here’s Apple’s guide for agencies.
   – You’ll need to get whomever controls the Apple Maps profile for the business to set you as its agency in the Business.Apple.com interface. If you’re not an agency, you just need to get admin access to the profile, for which you’ll need an Apple account.
   – Once you get this set-up, it’s all pretty simple.

2. Some Handy Tips To Improve Your Apple Maps Ads Performance

   Here are a few things I have figured out so far:

   – As part of your ad, you can use your “Brand logo” or “Photos”. Photos are the images you either upload or are already connected with your profile thanks to users adding them.
   – The size of Apple Maps Ads photos must be minimum 720px x 960px.
   – You only get 25 characters for your ad copy. That’s not much. You can use photos with text to get more words in your ad. The actual ads are pretty small, particularly on mobile, so I recommend you use minimal wording in your photos so what you do use is legible. And make sure to add padding on the top and bottom of the photos or else the text will probably get cropped out. I found that 250px padding on the top and bottom gave enough room to display all the text in the photos in the ad.
   – Add a pseudo-campaign tag your website URL to be able to track clicks from Apple Maps Ads. Apple will not let you add a true “utm_source” parameter to your business profile website URL, so you won’t be able to create a “campaign” in Google Analytics to track these. I used “?utmsource=apple-maps” and it worked. I was then able to set up a custom GA report to track referrals that landing on the client’s homepage + ?utmsource=apple-maps. You can just use something simpler like “?apple-maps” as well.
   – If you are a restaurant that serves alcohol, you may want to try to scrub any photos of your bar and/or booze from your profile as that will limit where Apple will show your ads. It’s not clear what the limitation is, but I suspect it’s that they won’t show your ads to kids, who are probably not your target anyhow.

3. How Does Apple Maps Report Performance

   Here’s a quick walk-through of the Apple Maps Ads reporting dashboards along with how to track referrals from Apple Maps Ads in Google Analytics:

   I forgot to note in the video that you can’t separate Apple Maps Ads referrals from all Apple Maps referrals in Google Analytics. I’ll have to figure out that one down the road.