Google is planning to crank up advertising on its navigation app Waze

• Google-owned community app Waze wants to be an effective marketing tool for brands and businesses.
• Having worked with big brands over the years, the app is rolling out a series of ad products dedicated to small and local businesses.
• The ads are aimed at driving location awareness and in-store traffic, while delivering data to small and local businesses.
• In catering to small advertisers, Waze is clearly following its parent company's playbook as it bids for a greater share of ad dollars.

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Waze does not just want to be known as a useful navigation tool for drivers on the road - but also an effective marketing tool for brands and businesses off it.

Since launching its own ads platform in 2012, the Google-owned community navigation app has run ad campaigns for a list of big-name advertisers including Dunkin' Donuts and Adidas. Now, it is opening itself up to local advertisers.

Specifically Waze is rolling out a series of ad products dedicated to small and local businesses looking to reach customers while they're on the road, called Waze Local. Ads on Waze will appear directly on the digital maps people use to get around.

"We wanted to find a way to connect local businesses to our community of drivers - nearly 100 million people who spend as much as 11 hours per month on the app," said Matt Phillips, head of global small businesses at Waze.

Phillips said that Waze spoke to many small advertisers over the past two years, and found that they wanted ads that were simple to execute, could drive people to stores and provided tracking capabilities.

Those needs were reflected in the new suite of Waze ads. For example, Branded Pins pop up like digital billboards on the Waze app, and can be used by brands to sponsor locations. Drivers can use branded pins to reroute to the destination, save a place for later or look up more information, and they only show up if users are close by.

Zero-Speed Takeovers, on the other hand, are ads that only show up when a driver has stopped for at least three seconds and disappear if the car is on the move again. They are designed to communicate more information than branded pins and can be used for purposes like limited promotions.

The third new Waze ad format is Promoted Search, via which local businesses can buy ads at the top of search results within the Waze app - much like they do on Google.

Kung Fu Tea, a medium-sized brand with 160 locations across the US, has beta-tested Waze Local across 16 of its stores, said Mai Shi, marketing and PR lead at the company.

Over the course of three months, the brand saw more than 5,500 drivers navigate straight to those 16 Kung Fu Tea locations thanks to these ads. It also saw a 30% increase in navigations to its Springfield, Illinois location using the offering.

Other brands who have tried out Branded Pins also saw a 20.4% increase in monthly navigations, Waze said.

"They don't want to drive traffic to their website, they want to drive traffic in-store," said Phillips. "That is critical."

While Google has incorporated some of Waze's real-time traffic reporting into Google Maps for mobile and desktop, Waze still functions autonomously, at least as far as its advertising products go. Still, it is clearly following its parent company's playbook as it bids for a greater share of ad dollars. Google, after all, grew in part by catering to and racking up ad spending from millions of small advertisers.

Expect Waze to continue drawing inspiration from the mothership moving forward as well, with Phillips saying that it planned to open up its API to outside developers and agencies in the future.

"Advertisers love being on Waze and the community on Waze," he said. "Looking forward, we want to spend more time building access like APIs."

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