12/04/2016 3 min read by Ivan Teh

Back to Basics with Ad Extensions

Back To Basics With Ad Extensions

If you were given the opportunity to have your ads more visible, for minimal effort, you would take it wouldn’t you? Well that opportunity already exists, with ad extensions.

Proper use of ad extensions has been proven to have the potential to dramatically increase your CTR. If all things are equal, then campaigns that actually make use of ad extensions will rank better. They come at no extra cost and all that extra front page real estate, for minimal effort.

In this article, I’ll highlight 5 of the most important ad extensions that will have positive effects on your AdWords campaigns. The 5 are:

  1. Call extensions
  2. Sitelink extensions
  3. Review extensions
  4. Location extensions
  5. Call out extensions

Call extensions are the way to go if you want customers to contact you promptly. Going back to our ‘The Move To Mobile’ article, we live in a world where the majority of information we consume comes from our mobiles. Call extensions include your phone number into text ads, which is otherwise not allowed by Google. On mobile devices, they add a button next to your ads for a click-to-call function.

For a small amount of effort, this extension provides a great call to action for your ads to get that phone ringing!

Sitelink extensions are the best way to promote any additional areas of business without forking out the extra budget for new campaigns. These extensions add more lines to your ad creatives, and overall increase the real estate you have on the front page. They are a proven way to dramatically increase your CTR’s and overall campaign performance.

Example of sitelinks in use:

01-Ad-extension-1

Review extensions are a great way to instantly boost your social proof versus ads competing against you. If you have a genuine third-party review, you can add it as an extension and it will appear within your ad text.

For example, an award from tripadvisor for a travel company would count, while a review left on a business’ Google + page by your favourite customer wouldn’t.

Location extensions are pretty self explanatory. If you want your customers to know where your physical stores are, help them in doing so by adding this extension in. A recent upgrade allows you to link your Google My Business page to your AdWords account.

Link the two together and then all you have to do is choose which location you want to add to a select campaign. This upgrade is especially useful if you have multiple physical stores & online campaigns in different regions.

Last but not least are Call-out extensions. These are a relatively new addition to AdWords. They let you include additional descriptions in your standard text ad.

They’re really useful to highlight your company’s points of difference. For example if you do free delivery, value your companies customer service, or have a seasonal sale. Include these in your call-outs!

To make it easier, here’s the visual difference of an ad that fully utilises it’s extensions compared to one that doesn’t.

02-Ad-extension-2 03-Ad-extension-3

The top advertiser is utilising their ad extensions to full potential. You can see call out extensions, sitelink extensions and a location extension. The one below isn’t.

It’s pretty obvious which one looks better, and which one you’d be more inclined to click.

So put aside that time to set up these extensions and watch your traffic grow!

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