Often underestimated feature in Google Ads are the ad extensions. You don’t want to miss out on driving additional traffic to your website. It only takes a little effort to include some extra links to your site that the users may find helpful. Read this article about Google ad extensions. In detail we talk about how and when they work as well as decide which are best for your business.
Location Extensions
With these extensions, you can drive traffic to your business. For example, by displaying your address, the distance from the Google user to your address or the mapped direction to your address.
Location extensions are essential to any business’ local search marketing efforts because of the increasing prevalence of local queries searched via mobile. Local queries are usually searched with high commercial intent therefore neglecting them can be costly.
Call Extensions
Call Extensions allow the users to call your business directly from an ad. By including this you encourage people to involve with your brand even quicker and create a meaningful engagement.
These extensions come in two forms: it’s either a phone number on a desktop or a call button on a mobile.
A click on the call button counts as a click so does cost money. Nevertheless, as most searches come from mobile phones, for most users, it will be an easy step to contact your business, which makes them get closer to your brand even faster.
Sitelink Extensions
Sitelink extensions are great if your goal is to drive traffic to the website but not a single landing page. It is important that they match the intent of the user as well. They highlight specific popular landing pages and help the user find what they are looking for faster. Therefore, they serve as an additional incentive to visit your website, for example, they can be a contact us, testimonials or service pages.
At no additional cost, sitelinks allow you to entice the users to visit your site by clicking links that lead to more specific pages across your website. Not only you’re your ads take up more physical space on the user’s search feed but with a single text ad you can match unique forms of user intent and improve your CTRs.
Callout Extensions
Because the online advertising landscape is highly competitive, these types of callouts are perfect for highlighting the benefits of the product/brand and differentiate yourself from the industry rivals.
Considering the bottom-of-funnel nature of callout extensions, it’s best to leverage them when a user is searching for something with high commercial intent. For example, by providing some special offers or outstanding features of the product you increase the chance of increasing your CTR by attracting users who are at the beginning of the customer journey.
Structured Snippet Extensions
Structured Snippet Extensions enable you to list the specific products, services and destinations. They’re shown below the ad description in a list format and are preceded by a header.
Similar to sitelink extensions, structured snippet extensions aim to provide additional information that targets the user’s intention but on a more specific level. For example, if a user is searching for a specific type of the product, by listing it in the extension you increase the likelihood of the user clicking through.
Also, as with the callout ad extensions, their purpose is to differentiate your brand and entice clicks. However, they focus on the specificity of the products and services rather than focusing on unique selling point (USP) and other benefits of the brand/product.
Price Extensions
Price is a big factor in a consumer buying decision. Therefore, providing this additional information allow a consumer to decide if they will be willing to purchase the product before clicking on the actual ad.
Some consumers may not go to the website and search for price information. By including price extensions, you provide an advantage to the prospect and increase the likelihood of beating the competition and attracting customers to your website.
App Extensions
As simple as the title suggest, app extensions are there to entice people to download your app. You can see them on mobile searches and display ratings, the number of people who submit the ratings and the price, which makes it even more enticing for people to click through.
App extensions are perfect if your business has a mobile app and you consider a download an important conversion.
Image Extensions
Different to other types of Google ad extensions, Image Extensions don’t rely on the text to expand your coverage on the SERPs. They allow to give the ads more of a visual component and make them more appealing. You can use up to 20 images so it’s great for easily testing what works well.
Image ad extensions can be a great addition to any campaign. When the user clicks on the image ad extension Google treats it as a click on the headline and lead them normally to the dedicated landing page. Therefore, it’s very important to align your image ad extensions with your campaign structure. For example, if you use an image that the user cannot find on the landing page you risk a bad user experience.
To ensure a good user experience, it’s important to make sure the image ad extensions have no logo or text overlays. Also, they cannot be GIFs and have to be good quality, and well-cropped.
They shouldn’t include text as it may not be visible in the search and Google may disapprove them. Images should be simple and relevant to the dedicated landing page as well as the keywords and ads you have in your campaign.
Lead form extension
Lead forms are the latest extension on Google ad campaigns. It lets people submit their information in a form directly from your ad. This extension is a powerful tool to incorporate to Search, Display, YouTube, or Discovery campaigns and just like many other extensions, it sticks out on a smaller mobile SERP making your ads appear larger.
Lead forms replaces the need for users to visit your mobile site to convert. Google has made it quick and easy by pre-populated contact details for those already signed into their Google account. Therefore, allowing the user to immediately convert with one simple click.
Boost your CTR with Google ads extensions and don’t miss out on driving additional traffic to your website!
At WBS we always use extensions to improve campaign performance. Interested in running PPC ads? Give us a call.
