Adwords Tip Of The Day - Use ALL Relevant Extensions
One of the best features in Adwords is "ad extensions".
As the name implies, these are extensions that enhance the appearance and relevance of your ads, allowing you to communicate more data.
Long story short, correct use of ad extensions helps boost your Click Through Rates (CTRs) which means more traffic and better results ... and hopefully more customers.
Ad extensions can also boost your "Ad Rank". When Adwords first started (many years ago now) it was purely a pay-to-play platform. He/she who bidded the most for their ads ranked at the top. However, this meant that smaller advertisers with better/more relevant products and services couldn't compete with the big guns.
The solution was a system called "Ad Rank". Now, Adwords factors in many things like your bid, the quality/relevancy of your ads, your landing pages etc to determine who should rank where in Adwords results.
By using extensions you can potentially boost you Ad Rank and get MORE clicks for LESS money.
There are many extension types available in Adwords, and setting them up is not too difficult.
However, I frequently see many advertisers missing out on easy wins by failing to implement ad extensions to their fullest potential.
The exact ad extension types that are relevant to your business will vary depending on what you're selling and how you're selling it, but at a minimum I believe most businesses can do well with:
* Call extensions - displaying a phone number for your business, which can be clicked to call.
* Location extensions - show physical locations for your business (this integrates with "Google My Business" - another topic I will discuss in the future)
* Sitelink extensions - these are "deep links" to areas on your site like 'about us', 'contact' etc. Don't forget you can add a descriptor line to each sitelink (I frequently see this missed) e.g. "About Us - Learn more about our friendly team of heat pump pros"
* Callout extensions - short lines of text that allow you to 'call out' things about your business, products or services. I like to use this to share benefits of a business, e.g. "100% NZ owned" or "30 day money-back guarantee".
* Structured snippet extensions - based on a series of pre-defined descriptors (called headers), e.g. "types" or "styles" you can provide more info about your products. An example would be "Service Catalog - Heat Pump Repair, Heat Pump Install, Heat Pump Cleaning". These are great for adding relevancy to your ads and showing searchers the services/products you offer.
* Price extensions - this is a new-ish extension type, and I really like it for both eCommerce/product sale businesses AND service businesses. You can add pricing ranges/from prices/up-to prices for different products and services (either at an individual level or at a category level). E.g. "heat pump installation $1000-2000".
* Message extensions - this is another extension type I frequently see people ignoring. With message extensions, a searcher can click on this (on their mobile phone) and a pre-populated text message appears, which you have specified. E.g. "plz call me on this number re: heat pump install". If you've got a reception or inbound team, grab a cheap prepaid cell phone for everyone to share and set this up.
There are many other extension types, such as App downloads, but the ones I've listed above are most likely to be relevant to your business.
Also remember that extensions (depending on type) can be set at an account level, the campaign level, and sometimes even ad group level.
This means that with a bit of effort, you can really tailor your extensions to provide a lot of relevancy to searchers and help boost your performance.
Hopefully this is useful. Any questions please leave a comment below.
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