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Updates To AdWords Ad Extensions

In the past, I have written about many of the most popular AdWords ad extensions, like sitelinks, call extensions, location extensions, and social extensions. However, AdWords is constantly trying out new ad extensions in its beta program and rolling out successful extensions so that everyone can use them. Because of this, there are often new ad extensions available that cause-related marketers are not aware of! Let’s see what’s new.

A Refresher on Ad Extensions

AdWords ad extensions are exactly what they sound like – extensions that add additional information below your AdWords ad when they show on the search engine results page. Most of them show only when your ad appears above the organic search results, but a select few (like call extensions) can also show when your ad is in the right column. Additionally, most of them do not cost anything extra – if a user clicks on your ad extension, you are charged the same as if they clicked on the headline in the ad itself. Ad extensions are important and useful for three reasons: 

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1. They help differentiate your ad and make it stand out on the page. Click-through-rates on ads with ad extensions are almost always higher than ads without extensions.

2. They make your ad bigger, meaning that your competitors’ ads are pushed farther down the page. (Which is always a good thing!)

3. They allow you to add more information to your ad about your organization without taking up crucial character space in the ad copy itself.

Dynamic Sitelinks

Dynamic sitelinks are the newest extension to be rolled out to all AdWords users. They are the same in practice as normal Ad Sitelinks – they add two to six additional links below your ads. Unlike normal Ad Sitelinks, however, you do not choose the links that appear – AdWords auto-populates dynamic sitelinks based on what it thinks will be most useful to users who searched on that keyword. If you already have Ad Sitelinks set up, AdWords will default to showing those, but if you don’t have sitelinks already chosen, dynamic sitelinks would be a quick way to dive into Ad Extensions.

Review Extensions

Review extensions allow you to add positive third-party reviews just below your ad. In addition to the normal benefits of ad extensions, review extensions also help increase user’s trust in your ad – Google claims they can boost click-through-rates by up to 10%. For these extensions, AdWords won’t charge you if users click on the review, only if they click on the headline of the ad. To add review extensions you only need a third-party review (that you can then shorten or paraphrase), and a link so that users can click through and see the original review. 

Previous Visit Annotations

Some ad extensions every advertiser is automatically opted-in to, and previous visit annotations are one of them. They show just below your ad and tell a user how many times they’ve visited your site before, and when their last visit was. For example: “You’ve visited example.com 3 times. Last visit: today.”

Personally, I think they’re a bit creepy, but I could see them being helpful to users who are comparison shopping nonprofits and trying to decide where to donate. Either way, because every advertiser is automatically opted-in, previous visit annotations have likely already been showing on some of your ads for weeks or possibly months. If at any point you wish to opt-out of previous visit annotations, you can submit a request to AdWords.

Consumer Ratings Extensions

Consumer ratings extensions add information (such as rankings, or how many stars your organization gets on average) from your organization’s Google Consumer Surveys platform. Similar to previous visit annotations, every advertiser is automatically opted-in to these extensions, so if your organization sells anything and has any consumer ratings through Google, these extensions are probably already being shown with your ads. If you don’t want these extensions shown, there is no specific request form but they ask you to contact AdWords.

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