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6 Simple Steps to Boost PPC Performance

If you’re wondering how to take your pay-per-click search engine marketing campaign to the next level then Google Adwords Ad Extensions may help. Ad Extensions provide extra information on your traditional PPC ads that give potential customers more reasons to click on your ads – such as more website page links, product information, or a phone number.

Ad Extensions are really simple to implement at campaign level and there are some great benefits:

  • Provide additional information about your products and business within your standard ads
  • Help increase click-through rates (CTR) and impressions
  • Take up more space above the fold on the search engine results page
  • Performance can be tracked
  • They’re FREE!

 

Currently Google provides 6 different types of ad extension:

  1. Location
  2. Call
  3. Sitelinks
  4. Product
  5. Social
  6. Mobile App

Location Extensions

Location extensions let you include your business address and phone number as drop down items on your standard ads. If you have multiple locations the display can expand to show the phone number and address of each location:

Adwords Location extension in Google Search Results Address dropdown location extension from Google Adwords

Call Extensions

Call extensions allow customers to call your business directly from your ad by using mobile devices; alternatively customers can call you manually using a VoIP number provided by Google Call Metrics so that call activity can be measured. Call Metrics can be enabled within Adwords.

Call metrics from Google Analytics

Sitelinks Extensions

Sitelinks extensions allow you to include up to 6 additional links to specific, relevant content deeper within your website – just beneath the standard ad. Sitelinks are very simple to implement and I’ve found they are among the easiest and best options to increase your CTRs immediately. On average, advertisers who use ad sitelinks have seen their ad CTR improve by 30%.

Sitelinks Extensions in Google Adwords Ads

Product Extensions

Product extensions can display relevant product images alongside your normal text ads. You just need a Google Merchant Center account connected to your Adwords account. This can show an image of the specific product your potential customer searched for:

Product extensions in Google Adwords

Social Extensions

Social extensions allow you to link your Google+ page to your Adwords campaigns and all your +1s from your page, website, ads and search get tallied together. This means if someone is searching for your products on search, and sees your ad, recommendations from friends in their Google+ circles are displayed directly with it. Google says search ads with annotations see a 5-10% uplift in click through rate – although the real picture may be more complex than that. And with slow uptake of Google+ outside the technology and business communities Social Extensions are less likely to directly impact most PPC campaigns for a while yet.

Mobile App Extensions

Mobile app extensions can add link to your mobile app onto your PPC ads. This is a new way to promote your mobile apps when Smartphone users are searching for your brand, product or service and shows how seriously Google takes the mobile channel. According to Google, beta participants saw a 6% lift in CTR for campaigns using Mobile App extensions. If that data is representative then it has profound implications for brands.

There are two features within mobile app extensions. The first is a simple link to Google Play – positioned below normal paid search results – for people to download your app.

How can we help?

We can implement the right technology and analytics for your business, set up tracking tags across all online activity and create a content strategy for all customer touchpoints that drive the prospects towards the final conversion.

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