Ad Extensions

Google always seems to be adding new ad extensions. It’s cool if you can use those shiny new ones, but I’m much more interested in building out my ‘bread & butter’ extensions as well as I can: sitelinks, callouts, call, location, structured snippets, price, and promotion.

Structural Considerations

The only ad extensions I usually consider adding at the account level are call and location extensions, but there are many situations when I don’t even do that. Depending on how the extensions have been organized, some can probably be applied to many campaigns, and others to just one or two. I look at each of my extensions and apply them to all applicable campaigns. Everything said about campaigns also applies to ad groups.

 How do you create ad extensions?

When writing ads and extensions, I take a full survey of the client’s selling points and make a list of things I would like to incorporate into my ad unit.

Too many PPC managers only think about incorporating this information through the ad text itself. But ad extensions are often a better way to go about getting this information into the ad unit. So how do you decide what should go into ad text and what should go into extensions? 

I try to think of this in terms of a hierarchy. What pieces of information apply to everything this client does? What applies only to certain groups of products or services? Anything that’s specific to an individual product or service probably isn’t anything I’d want to put in ad extensions. Something that’s true for a group of products or services could probably go into ad extensions for those campaigns/ad groups. But all the stuff that applies to everything a client does gets fast-tracked to becoming an ad extension.

Write out that list of things. Some will be shorter or longer or easier or harder to communicate with different extensions. A piece of information that fits within 25 characters or less is a great fit for a callout. If it’s longer than that, it might be usable in a sitelink (with descriptions). Are a few pieces of information related? If so, consider adding them as structured snippets.  

Ultimately, your guide should be your sincere desire to help the end user find the information they were searching for.