10 Great AdWords Ad Extensions And When To Use Them

Hello, my name is Tara. I’m a Digital Marketing Executive here at Koozai, and today I’m going to talk to you about ad extensions.

Ad extensions are a feature within Google AdWords which allow you to extend your ads and enhance them with extra information. This is obviously great for users because it helps them to make a decision on which result to click on, and it’s also great for advertisers because you get all this extra ad space for the same price.

These are the main extensions which are around at the moment, and there are always new ones being created. So keep an eye on the AdWords blog to see what the latest extensions are.

I’m going to go through each extension and just give you a couple of my top tips for using them and ways to make them successful.

Seller ratings are an extension which is great if you’ve got an e-commerce website. If your products have been sold via Google Shopping and people have left reviews via Google Shopping, it can pull in the data from that and show a review for your products. There are also going to be review extensions coming in very shortly which will kind of make this a lot easier and make it applicable for people who don’t have e-commerce websites or that don’t use Google Shopping.

Offer extensions are something which came in with enhanced campaigns. They are really great for creating footfall into a physical store. That’s what they were designed to do. But they also work well if you’ve got an e-commerce shop. You can set them up if you’ve got a product discount or a particular product offer. But you can also use them really effectively for things that you might not consider to be an offer. For example, if you’ve got free whitepaper downloads, that could be set up as an offer to say “download a free whitepaper”. Or if the first call-out is free in your service, say you’re a plumber and the first call-out would be free anyway, that could be considered as an offer. So it’s just about testing the water and seeing what will go as an offer and what will get rejected.

App extensions are great if you’ve got an app. You can schedule them at ad group levels. So for example, British Gas have got lots of really cool apps. They could really go to town with this and have so many apps scheduled for each different ad group. It’s something that works really well if you’ve already got apps and especially if you’ve got a few of them because you can set them at such a granular level.

Site links are really useful. They are probably one of the most traditional kinds of ad extensions. They have now been enhanced even further so you can put in a line of description for each of your site links. So it’s like not only having your main result, but having a few smaller mini results just below it with the description. This is really helpful if you’ve got, for example, an e-commerce site because you can set them at ad group levels. If you’ve got a product with lots of different colour variations, you can set up your ad extensions at that product level to be specific. So you can set up ad extensions for each different colour variation of the product. You can also now schedule your site links, which might be helpful if you think certain site links are going to be more helpful at certain times of the day.

Call extensions are one of the best kinds of ad extensions, in my opinion. If you target mobile devices, they are absolutely fantastic because the user can click straight through and call you. They’ve been enhanced lots recently so you can now use a Google forwarding number, which means that you still put in your normal telephone number, but when Google displays your ad, it will show it with a dynamic number that it has generated. If the user views that on a tablet or a desktop and then dials it and calls you, that won’t cost you anything. It won’t even cost you the cost of a click. If they call it via a mobile device, so they literally click through and call, then all you will be charged is the same amount as you would be charged for that click. This is great because obviously a call is a lot more valuable than a click in most instances.

You can schedule your call extensions as well now. If you’re only in the office between 9 and 5, make sure your call extensions are only scheduled to show at those times, because there’s no point having them show at midnight when there’s nobody there to actually answer the phone and then you would have paid for that click.

Social extensions are great if you use Google+. Even if you don’t, I would say have them set up because in the future when everyone is really using it a lot more, you’ll find that other advertisers might have more of an advantage because they’ve got the extensions in place. So even if you don’t think it’s valuable to you at the moment, I would say set it up anyway. You can do this just by linking your Google+ page and your AdWords account. It’s really simple as long as your Google+ page is authorised.

Dynamic search ads are a kind of ad extension. Though, to be honest, they should be set up in a separate campaign because they tend to perform quite poorly, in my opinion. There’s lots of things you can do with them to optimise them to try and help them perform better. But if you’ve got a well structured AdWords account and you keep an eye on it regularly, you shouldn’t really need to use dynamic search ads. If you do use them, I would say make sure you exclude the areas of your site that you wouldn’t used as landing pages or that you wouldn’t want advertised, for example, your terms and conditions or any product areas that just don’t tend to convert very well.

Email extensions are something which you need to contact your AdWords rep to get. Big brands like Thomson Holidays, if you Google them, you’ll see that they tend to use them very well.

Product listing ads aren’t strictly an extension, but they are replacing product extensions. So I thought I’d give them a brief mention here. If you’ve got an e-commerce website, it’s really worth getting these. They’re really, really cost effective, and they give you the extra space on the page. They run as well as your search ads, as your standard text ads. So you can have your text ads and then also have your product listing ads, just giving you that much more extra exposure. Because not many people use product listing ads at the moment, they are quite cheap. So I would say, if you are an e-commerce site, really have a look into them because they’re worth using.

So I think we’ve covered all the ad extensions here today. If you want any more information, you can look at the Koozai website or follow us on any of our social profiles.