What is an Ad Extension?

Ad Extensions are additional pieces of information that expand your advertisement to make it more useful to users. Ad extensions typically include telephone numbers, additional links from your website, seller reviews. You should select ad extensions that will help your advertising campaign to better meet your business goals.

As a general rule, there is no additional cost for taking advantage of ad extension options.

Some ad extensions are automated, which means AdWords automatically adds the extension information to your ad and these include click to call and automated calling, sitelink extensions. Other ad extensions are manual, meaning you can choose to customise your ads according to your own preferences. A full list of extension types can be found here.

Here are five ideas you can use to develop Ad Extensions that are just too good to be ignored

1. Sitelink Extensions

Google Adwords Sitelinks are additional links in your advert that will take prospective customers direct to a specific page on your website.

In this example, we can see the online retailer Boots firing up sitelinks for specific products. These sitelinks selections could be a function of seasonality, shopping trends, or specific promotions.

google adwords ad extensions - sitelinks example

 

Sitelink extensions allow you to:

  • measure the clicks going to specific sitelink pages on your website to learn even more about customer prefernces
  • run specific short term campaigns to deep pages on your site to make it easier to run seasonal campaigns
  • create sitelinks specifically for mobile users

 

2. Callout Extensions

Callout extensions allow you to include additional descriptive text in your standard text ads. You can include specific attributes about your business, products, and services that will show below your ad on the Google Search Network.

They appear like sitelinks, but the difference is they can’t be clicked. So it’s best to think of them like additional bullet points, mere snippets of extra information to help entice searchers.

In the example below, ASDA are including the call out extensions about quality and speed of delivery:  “100 Day Guarantee – Free Click and Collect – Next Day Delivery.”

adwords call out ad extensions example

 

4 Reasons to Use Callout Extensions:

  • They’re easy to implement, appear as simple text, and require no links to secondary pages.
  • They take advantage of the extra ad space within the Google Search results.
  • They promote details about your business; like popular services or unique offerings.
  • They’re available at no additional cost.

Callout Extensions allow for increased flexibility, as you can change the entire account without editing each ad text separately.

3. Click to Text Extensions

 

If you are targeting a mobile audience, then the click to text extensions provide a quick an effective way for your customers to get in touch intuitively and a way in which they feel comfortable.

The AdWords campaign will display a call to action “Send Us a Text” that looks like this.

If you want to know more, then we have written a detailed analysis and guide to using click to text.

Adwords_Click_to_text ad extensions

The benefits of click to text extensions include:

  • these are exceptionally good lead generation clicks with the user proactively interacting with your ad
  • for some user groups, sending a text message will be much more preferable to making a phone call or other type of enquiry
  • our own research has shown a higher click thru rate (CTR) for mobile users.


4. Call Extensions

Google Adwords Call Extensions give customers a convenient way to call your business directly from within the search results. And of course they can be combined with other extensions like Call outs and location extensions to great effect.

In this example for a car dealer, the phone number displays like this on a desktop computer:

call ad extensions example - AdWords

 

On mobile devices, users will see a different layout:

mobile ad extensions - call

 

The benefits of call extensions are quite straightforward:

  • if your business values phone calls, then this will drive the right kind of conversion
  • you will have a report detailing the numbers of calls your campaigns have driven, helping you to better evaluate your ROI
  • and you can schedule your call extensions to appear at specific times to best accommodate your business processes.

 

5. Review Extensions

You will often see ads displaying gold stars or other ratings details. There is good evidence demonstrating that by including reviews information will increase the success of your campaigns, with Google reporting clients experiencing a 19% increase in click thru rate by including review extensions.

In this example we can see an excellent star rating for a diamond retailer:

reviews ad extension - ADWords

And by clicking through on the ratings we can review the source of these reviews:

revivews source is trustpilot in ad extensions

This review extension is powered by the Feefo service, but reviews can also be collected by a variety of sources including Google’s own Customer Review Service, and a nubmber other approved review services including sites like Feefo, Reviews.co.uk

 

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