The Importance Of Ad Extensions

June 9, 2015

Ad extensions are helpful bonus items that go beyond your text ad to draw visitors to your site. They offer consumers the unique ability to complete some kind of action through your add (like download an app), or simply go straight to the page on a website that they are looking for (sitelinks). Some advertisers, however, have still not taken advantage of these incredibly useful tools in the Adwords toolbox. So, I’ve rounded up some reasons why everyone should at least give these a shot.

There are many different types of extensions:

  • Manual
    • Apps
    • Calls
    • Locations
    • Reviews
    • Sitelinks
    • Callouts
  • Automated
    • Consumer ratings
    • Previous visits
    • Seller ratings
    • Dynamic sitelink extensions
    • Dynamic structured snippets

For brevity’s sake, I’m sticking to the importance of call and sitelink extensions for this particular blog post.

Call Extensions

Call extensions offer searchers the ability to easily learn the number to call your business. If you’re in the hospitality or restaurant industry, this can be especially lucrative. In an increasingly mobile world, this one offers the ability to capture more and more attention. The company in the below example (a result for the query “Furniture store Atlanta”) is utilizing multiple ad extensions, most notably the call extension.

On mobile, this shows up as a button. You can imagine how this improves click-through-rate in a world where mobile searches are exceeding those done on desktop:

Call extensions also allow you to implement call tracking, and truly understand how effective your ads are alone. Additionally, you can use a different number for each ad to narrow down what works.

Sitelinks Extensions

Sitelinks offer a unique opportunity to drive more traffic to important pages on your site, or to take advantage of what you already know to be high traffic landing pages to maximize your chances of success with Adwords.

Just some benefits of these sitelink ad extensions include:

  • Offering quick access to pages on your site that convert well
  • Advertising more pages without having to create new ads
  • Capturing more users on the go who are looking for specific items
  • Flexibility in choosing when they show up (from time of day to the day of the week) and which ads utilize them
  • Use of relevant ad extensions now contributes to your overall Quality Score

What Can Be Difficult in Organic Search is Achievable in Adwords

With the slight unpredictability of organic sitelinks, it is definitely a relief to be able to place them in your ads. If you are lucky enough to have sitelinks associated with your site’s organic results in Google, you may not be happy with what pages are showing (though conjecture abounds in this arena, it’s likely that Google picks the robust, useful pages on your site that have the most traffic when producing these organic sitelinks). Running an ad for your brand name with sitelinks added might even give you insight into how having certain sitelinks (or having them at all) could help your business – or it could tell you which pages to ask Google not to show.

 

Not only do these sitelinks allow us to pick slightly different pages to showcase, they allow us to use calls-to-action as our hyperlinks to increase appeal.

These sitelinks can be incredibly effective for drawing in new customers, or even just for taking up more real estate than competitors.

The important thing to remember is that Google still has the purview to approve your sitelinks (meaning it’s not a definite that they will show all of them, or any at all); also, only a select number of ads will have them on one page. It’s also important to note that there are two types of these ad extensions:

  • Manual – These extensions allow you to choose which pages show and what language you want to use to show them (up to 25 characters in most languages). When you choose your sitelinks, a click costs the same as it would on your ad headline. What is shown, when, and format can all vary.
  • Dynamic – Google can decide that your ad would be better with sitelinks and choose to implement them (and, therefore, choose which ones to show). Google won’t charge for the clicks on these particular sitelinks.

Though the click –through rate for the actual sitelinks may not be stellar, those ads with sitelinks have shown up to a 10% uplift in headline CTR. Taking up more space has its advantages.