Although most website owners and webmasters are familiar with the Google AdWords platform, not all of them realize that they will be able to enhance their online advert campaigns substantially by using one or more of the many available AdWords Extensions. Using these effectively will help boost the income derived from these ads tremendously.
What are AdWords Extensions?
These extensions are a type of advert that displays additional information about a business. This can include, but may not be limited to business operating hours, contact numbers, store locations, delivery options, and direct links to some of a company’s most popular product or service offerings, specials of the day or week and a lot more. Basically, they give site visitors as many reasons as possible to click on a company’s adverts. It also provides site visitors with fast access to the page or area of a site that they are the most interested in – no more having to navigate through multiple links or pages in order to do so.
Here is a list of extensions:
- Sitelinks extensions
- Location extensions
- Call extensions
- App extensions
- Review extensions
- Callout extensions
- Structured snippet extensions
How these Extensions Work
AdWords shows the chosen extensions with an advert when it calculates that they extension(s) will help improve a website owner’s campaign performance. Although there is no guarantee that the AdWords extensions will show with the chosen adverts, site owners will be able to keep track of when they do by clicking on the ‘Ad Extensions’ tab. AdWords will create and display the required extensions when it predicts that they will have a positive impact on the performance of a particular advert.
Here’s how they look:
Reasons why they may not Work
There are instances where all of the chosen AdWords extensions may not be displayed, and implementing the Policy Details column to the statistics view will provide site owners with additional information as to why some (or all) extensions are not displaying. This will enable them to see whether validation errors caused by their chosen extension settings are the cause or whether any Google policies may have been violated or ignored. Other reasons for extensions not displaying can include the ad rank, overall keyword quality, other ad extensions that may have been enabled and the position of the advert on Google’s search results page.
Benefits of Ad Extensions
The main benefits that site owners and webmasters can enjoy when using the available ad extensions include vastly improved online visibility and a far better return on investment (ROI). In many cases, the extensions will improve an advert’s overall visibility because they tend to appear above the search results instead of on the sidebar. If there is a case where two competing adverts have the same quality and bid amount, the one with the higher expected impact from the extensions used will display higher. The extensions can also help improve an advert’s clickthrough rate (CTR) as well, resulting in more traffic being directed to the site in question.
Are Extra Costs Involved?
Although it doesn’t cost extra for site owners to add extensions to existing AdWords campaigns, they will still be charged as normal for clicks on their adverts. There may be cases where charges will be levies for certain interactions that extensions enable. For example, charges will be levied when call buttons on call extensions, download buttons on app extensions or directions icons on location extensions are clicked by visitors. Clicks on social and review extensions as well as those on seller ratings are however not charged for. The same policy applies as with regular AdWords campaigns though, in that charges will be levied for no more than two clicks per impression on each ad.
Creating Editing and Removing Ad Extensions
Quite a few of the automated extensions don’t require any form of setup and as a result, they will appear with an advert if it meets certain criteria. These include previous visits, social extensions and consumer ratings at present, but may change from time to time. Extensions can be edited at any time, with the exception of location extensions and annotations that appear automatically for an advert. Extensions can also be removed from campaigns whenever required, and site owners can choose to remove them from as few or as many campaigns as they wish.
Regardless of whether a business has only started operating recently or it has already grown quite substantially, using Google AdWords extensions correctly will enable them to expand their online reach substantially. Businesses have nothing to lose and everything to gain when using them, so why not start experimenting with them today?