Besides writing relevant ad copy another way to improve your search ad results is by including ad extensions. Ad extensions are a variety of text, hyperlinks, and call to actions that can help improve your results by making your ads more relevant to what the user is searching for. Ad extensions also provide additional information to help the user make the decision to click on your ad over the others in the search engine results.
Sitelink Extensions
These are links to other pages within your site and allow users to click on other headlines besides your text ad. You are allowed to put a headline along with two description lines. The headlines for the sitelink extensions should be short and sweet such as “shop”, “about”, and “contact us”. It saves the user time by not having to visit irrelevant pages and typically improves the click-through rate of your ad. This over time can help your ad to rank higher in the search results. Also, while the descriptions are technically optional, I always recommend filling them out because it is more text to include. Also, it gives you the option to describe the page the user would be going to which helps the click-through rate of the sitelink.
Callout Extensions
These lines of text are added to your text, but just as with the descriptions, they are not clickable. Think of the features of your brand or products that you would want to announce to someone seeing your ad. You are calling out what makes you unique, things such as “free shipping”, “top customer service”, “variety of products”, etc. Just as with many extensions the main reason to include callout extensions is more information in your ad, which helps to increase the click-through rate of your ads and thus overtime helping your ads to rank higher on the search results page.
Structured Snippet Extensions
Just as with callout extensions these extensions are not clickable. You are required to pick a header category such as “types” or “brands” and list out several offerings that fit that category. Whether you sell ECommerce products or offer services this is a great extension to include so a user knows the different products and services you offer. By adding this additional information again this will help to increase the click-through rate of your ads and thus overtime help you to rank higher on the search results page.
Call Extensions
When someone searches on their mobile phone, this extension allows the user to call the listed phone directly from the ad. This means the user doesn’t have to visit the website, they can just click and call from the ad. This is great especially for when a user searches for your brand or you’re showing a remarketing ad when someone already knows of your brand. By saving the step of having to dig through your website to find your phone number, this extension can help you capture leads or sales directly on the search results page.
Location Extension
This extension allows a user from the search results page to click on your address and be directed to Google Maps and shows them from their current location how far your location is from them. Note, this extension can only be used if you have an active Google My Business listing since that is what Google uses as your location for this type of ad extension. This extension is especially useful when you are trying to drive more in-store traffic so for local businesses such as restaurants, salons, and boutiques this extension is a must.
Price Extension
When you have multiple products listed on your site with a price this is a very useful extension to have. You can list your different products with the price, a short description and a link to that particular product. Think of this as Google Shopping on your search ads without the images. Since users can click on the specific products they can save time by going directly to the product page they are looking for which can help you to sell more products using your search ads.
Promotion Extension
If you offer any type of discount code or price reduction even if it is a newsletter offer this is a great extension to include. Users can see the direct promo code or the offering directly. You can drive them to any page on your website for this extension. You can also set a date for this extension to run. For instance, if you have a limited time offer you can create a promotion extension to run during the timeframe of your promotion.
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