In my last couple of posts I’ve explained Ad Sitelinks and Location Extensions, two very important features of AdWords. Today, I will discuss an essential feature for e-commerce websites – Product Extensions.
Product Extensions may show certain products from your Google Merchant Center when a search query is relevant to one of your products, Google may show images, titles, and prices of the products. Product Extensions are generally shown in two ways on Google SERPs:
In the top three results, you will gain up to three extra lines populated by your products that are most relevant to the search query. As I’ve mentioned before – these precious extra lines in Google SERPs are absolutely invaluable, particularly the added visibility improvement of your ad.
When not in the top three, you can still get the benefit of Product Extensions, but it will show as a “plus box” link. This can be extended out by the searcher to show pictures, titles, and prices. Again, standing out in the crowd is the key, and this certainly gives you an extra boost.
Google Merchant Centre
In order to benefit from product extensions you will need to setup Google Merchant Centre. Every e-commerce website should have this setup, even if you are not planning using product extensions – Merchant Centre lets you upload a list of your products for exposure on Google Shopping.
I may write another post on merchant centre, but for now, here is the specification for a data feed of your products you will need to upload in Google Merchant Centre: https://www.google.com/support/merchants/bin/answer.py?answer=188494. It simply gives you a list of fields you will need to fill out, and the accepted data feed file formats.
Setting up Product Extensions in AdWords
Select “Product Extensions” from the drop down menu “View: Location Extensions”.
Click on “new extension”.
Select the campaigns you wish to add Product Extensions. Notice the text “extend my ads with relevant product details from Google Merchant Center”. You will need to select your Google Merchant Centre account(s) here. If you do not have one you will see the text “You don’t have access to any Google Merchant Centre accounts.” Click “Save” and you are done.This post concludes my three part series on AdWords Ad Extensions and I hope it has been helpful to you. There are of course a couple of extra extensions, which I may cover in due course but for now that’s my quick overview of the features. If you have any comments or questions please feel free to leave them below.
Check out other parts of this series below:
PS. While writing this post, I noticed Google have just started to include Meta descriptions in some AdWords ad copy – giving ads two lines of 70 characters texts (rather than the traditional two lines of 35 characters). There will be a post on this very soon, in the mean time, teaser screenshot below:
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