Ad extensions help you and your customers get the most from your text ads by allowing you to offer additional information about your business. Ad extensions allow you to include things like location, phone number, reviews, promotions and more to make your ad more appealing to potential customers.
Google research shows that advertisers who use ad extensions can see their click-through rate improve by up to 30%.
As extensions impact your click-through rate, they’re a factor of quality score. As your quality score combined with your bid is your ad rank, ad extensions essentially help your place in the auctions.
There are four extensions that every AdWords manager should be using:
- Sitelinks
- Callouts
- Structured Snippets
- Seller Ratings
Whereas other ad extensions are only suitable for certain types of businesses.
Are you taking advantage of the click boosting performance powers of these four ad extensions? The following best practices of these extensions can level-up your ads and see your ads outperform your competitors!
1. Sitelinks
Sitelinks allow you to add targeted links in your ad pointing to web pages that are important to your business. These pages can be anything from high-converting landing pages to products pages and deals.
The extension allows you to add descriptions as well, but these typically display with branded searches and are less important.
Just with any other ad extension, Sitelinks can be added at your account level, so Sitelinks can go across your entire account. Sitelinks are available for ads with mobile, tablet and desktop targeting globally. On mobile, up to eight Sitelinks can be displayed but on desktop it’s recommended to have between four and six Sitelinks but less can be displayed as well.
Google gives you 25 characters to use in each Sitelink but the optimal number is around 18-20 on desktop and 12-15 on mobile.
So the number of characters in your Sitelink is definitely something to test. You may find that your ad may display more often as a result, which means you’ll show more than your competitors, which is always a good thing.
Something to bear in mind is if use the same destination page twice, the URL won’t display the second time. You can have a Sitelink with the same destination, but Google will not display those two Sitelinks together. So if you have eight Sitelinks and four of them have got the same destination, you will only ever see one of those four at once.
2. Callouts
Callout extensions are really simple, they’re little non-clickable text ad extensions that extend your ad by another line. Callouts are perfect for adding things like your business’ USPs and differentiators or a seasonal promotion.
The recommended number of Callouts is between four and six, but it’s better to have more than five to test.
3. Structured Snippets
Structured Snippets are a bit like Callouts, but are more for categorising and listing the services you deliver or the products you sell. As of a couple of years ago, two structured snippets can be displayed. It’s recommended to create three Structured Snippets to have them cycling around if applicable to your business.
4. Seller Ratings
You must utilise the seller extension if your business qualifies. The easiest way to qualify for the extension is to get reviews on Google. Google will then automatically add the review extension to your account.
With the extension you get the nice star rating appear underneath your advert, which, if your competitors don’t have, makes you stand out by a mile in a positive way – unless your reviews are one out of five!
Summary
To summarise, in order to give your account a boost, your ads a boost and to lift your clicks beyond your competitors, make sure you’re using these four ad extensions.
Give them a try and keep testing them as it’s super important to keep lifting your click-through rate beyond your competitors.