With how competitive PPC advertising can be on Google Adwords and Bing ads, you need to standout from your competitors using the advanced features that each platform gives you. While many online advertisers only use only the basic search ad functionality, using as many ad extensions as you can (that make sense to use for your business) can boost your PPC ad performance and help you get a better ROI from Google Adwords and Bing ads search campaigns. Here are examples of Google Adwords and Bing Ads top ad extension options and how to effectively use them for better results from PPC ads.
Sitelink Ad Extensions
While using these for things like “Contact Us” or “About Us” are fine, they can also be used for more selling points that set you apart from competitors or highlighting your other products that a new visitor may not be aware of. You can also build more trust with links to “View Our Work”, “Meet Our Team”, “Our Process”, and other links to additional information that can help close a sale. Also, make sure to use at least 4, otherwise you are missing out on valuable ad space.
Callout Ad Extensions
These are great for squeezing in additional selling points, such as “Free Shipping”, “30 Years of Experience”, “Certified”, etc. These are not clickable links, but they do add an additional line of text to your ad space.
Structured Snippet Ad Extensions
These are missed by many companies simply because they do not know how to use them. They add yet another line of text to your ad. With all other ad extensions combined you could take up a VERY large amount of space with your ad.
Structured Snippets currently have options available to add:
Amenities, Brands, Courses, Degree programs, Destinations, Featured hotels, Insurance coverage, Models, Neighborhoods, Service catalog, Shows, Styles, and Types.
A great example of how to use these effectively would be a PPC ad campaign for apartments – you could add all of your amenities using a Structured Snippet, rather than taking up valuable ad copy. This way you get the long list of amenities you need to list, but you don’t have to make the main part of your ad a long list that does not read well.
Message Extensions
Allows functionality for someone to click on the ad and then send the business a text message. This is great to book an appointment, get a quote, or get a quick question answered without a phone call or email. Remember, it has to be setup with a phone that can receive text messages, and has someone monitoring and replying to those text messages frequently. This is very useful for PPC for home services, or Google Adwords for a car dealership that wants to answer quick questions for a potential new client or sale.
Location Extensions
This allows you to show your physical address as an additional line of text in your ad, which can boost engagement to local users. This also establishes you as a local company that is nearby to separate you from other businesses that do not have a close by location. In order to set this up, link Google My Business account to Google Adwords to pull in address information to show on your ad.
Affiliate Location Extensions
If your product is available to buy in multiple store locations, use your Affiliate location extensions to highlight this. For example, your affiliate location extension would show “Available at Best Buy” or whichever retailer sells your product. This is a unique setup but can be useful to brands running PPC ads to get more information out about their products or new products that are available to purchase in many locations, not just their own website.
Price Extensions
These extensions add additional space to your ad to display specific pricing and details for various services you offer. For example, a plumbing service using Google Adwords PPC ads could show “Drain Clean Service $49” as a price extension, rather than having to take up this space in the main ad. It also adds more space that your ad takes up on the page.
App Extensions
These extensions are to give your users the OPTION to click to the Google Play or Apple App Store to download the app for your brand/company. If someone clicks on the headline of your actual ad, they will still go to your website. If you are wanting to drive app downloads, you would actually use App Promotion Ad format, not an app extension. While an app extension may get people to download your app, it is only 1 line of a large text ad that shows on searches, so it would not be ideal for primarily driving app installs.
Review Extensions
Review extensions allow you to add direct quotes or paraphrased versions of reviews by 3rd parties, even awards you have received. The guidelines are strict as to what can show as a review extension, but if your company or product has many reviews, you should consider adding this extension to highlight this. Learn more here.
Automated Extensions
Automated extensions are created automatically by Google Adwords. These automated ad extensions can show dynamic sitelinks, dynamic callouts, dynamic structured snippets, previous visits, seller ratings, consumer ratings, longer ad headlines, automated app extensions, and automated call extensions.
If you are wanting to only show the ad extensions you manually created, you can disable these. This is especially important if you have very specific sitelinks, callouts, and call extensions with specific tracking numbers you want to use without automatically generated ones interfering.