Standing Out With Google AdWords Extensions

Hello. My name’s Tara, and today I’m going to be talking to you about ad extensions for AdWords. In particular, I’m going to be going look at ad extensions that are relevant to the travel industry and ways that you might want to use them.

So let’s start with app extensions. If your site’s got an app, these are really great because you can extend your ad with a link to download your app. Whether it’s from the Android Store or the iPhone Store, you can have the link showing, depending on what device the user is searching on.

For example, Thomson have got a great app which helps users do things after they’ve purchased their holiday, say for example, add on extras or do things when they’ve arrived at the airport.  They could use remarketing lists for search ads to set up a campaign that only shows this app extension to users who’ve already purchased, so they can be sure that the app is relevant, they can drive downloads of it. The great thing about app extensions is that the download of an app and the interaction of someone using your app is probably more valuable to you than just a regular click to your page, because it’s almost like a conversion straight from your ad. So they’re well worth it considering they cost the same as a regular click.

Location extensions are ideal for the travel industry if you’ve got lots of local branches or even just one particular local branch that you want to push footfall into. So you can set up a location extension for your branches, be it all in the same campaign or in separate campaigns, depending on whether you’re bidding on terms like “travel agent Southampton,” for example, in which case you only want to have the Southampton location extension on that campaign. But if you’ve just got one campaign and you want the extensions to just show as and when they’re relevant to users, then you can add them all to that campaign, and Google will choose which one is relevant to the user’s location.

Communications extensions are something that the big travel brands do really well. So if you Google Thomson or Thomas Cook, you often see that there’s a little box underneath where you can put your email address and subscribe to email alerts. Now they work really well because you can integrate your search campaigns with your other marketing activities, so with your email marketing, and you can just grow your database through your AdWords ads. They work best on brand campaigns because the user has already got a trust of your brand, so they’re more happy to surrender their email address and have you contact them.

Review extensions are brilliant for the travel industry because nothing persuades someone that a holiday is right for them more than if someone else has recommended it. Review extensions work by you applying a small piece of text and a link to where that text is online for the review of your site. So it could be paraphrased if it’s a long review and you want to kind of shorten it to a few words, or if it’s just a small snippet of a review, you can copy and paste the exact text. When the user clicks on the extension, they are taken to the link where the review is, rather than to your site. But you don’t pay anything for that click, so you’re getting the extra ad space, and you’re helping improve the kind of authority of your business for no extra cost.

Call out extensions are relatively new, but they work really well for the travel industry. So often there’s things that you want to show off in your ad as a USP, but that you either don’t want to waste ad text space with, or perhaps they don’t serve the whole sitelink because there’s other points and other pages that you’d rather drive users to with your sitelinks. This is where call out extensions can become useful. So they’re little slots of text that appear underneath your ad, and they look similar to sitelinks, but they’re a lot shorter, and they aren’t links. So they’re just text.

So for example, if you wanted to show users that your site or your product is ATOL protected, this is a great thing to use in a call out extension, because maybe you don’t want to waste a whole sitelink telling people that your product is ATOL protected, but you do want to show them because it does help you stand out. So this is where call out extensions are useful.

With call out extensions, try to set up as many as you can, and then AdWords will pick which ones it thinks are most relevant to the user’s search and which one’s perform best.

And sitelinks, last but not least, are really, really important to all industries, but they work really well in the travel industry because you can really go to town on specific places within your campaign. So say you had a campaign for all of Europe or for France, for example, and then you could have sitelinks for different locations within France, and you can put them at campaign level or ad group level, depending on how specific your targeting is. But the main thing to remember is if you put them at campaign level, they need to be relevant to everything that’s in that campaign, and if you put them at ad group level, obviously they need to be specific to everything that’s in that ad group.

So those are just a few ad extensions that work well in the travel industry. If you’ve got any questions or you’d like any more information, then feel free to follow us on any of our social profiles.