Building Successful Low Budget PPC: Ad Extensions

In charge of building your first PPC account? Don’t have a lot of time or money to spend within AdWords? Well you came to the right place. We’re in week five of our six-part blog series in which Portent PPC Strategists Chad Kearns and Tim Johnson lay down the knowledge on best practices for achieving PPC success. Follow along to pick up tips on how to build your first PPC account like a PPC superstar.

Post #1: Building Successful Low Budget PPC: Account Structure

Post #2: Building Successful Low Budget PPC: Understanding your Campaign Settings

Post #3: Building Successful Low Budget PPC: Keywords

Post #4: Building Successful Low Budget PPC: Crafting Engaging AdsThere are several different types of ad extensions you can utilize in AdWords. Each one offers a unique way for you to provide potential customers with additional information such as phone numbers, directions, or services about your business, right from your ad.

Adding ad extensions is one of the quickest and easiest ways to give your click through rate a boost. They are simple to set up and do not cost you anything extra. Extensions are a great win-win that can help you build a successful PPC campaign.

Some of the different ad extensions include call extensions, location extensions, sitelink extensions, social extensions, product extensions, and more.

In this post, we will go over a few key ad extensions, the features they offer, and how to get them up and running in your campaigns today.

Sitelink Extensions

Sitelink extensions allow you to provide a list of additional links to pages on your website right from your ad.These extra links allow your ad to take up more real estate in the SERP, as well provide a customer with options so they can get straight to what they were looking for with less clicks.

To add sitelinks simply select a campaign, click the Ad Extensions tabs, and select Sitelink Extensions from the View drop-down menu.From here you can create new sitelinks by clicking the +New Sitelink button. You will need to craft link text (the title that will be displayed in your ad) and set a destination URL for each link you wish to create.

You can create two to six sitelinks for each campaign (you can create ad group level sitelinks as well with enhanced campaigns).  Try to stick with an even number of sitelinks to help ensure they format nicely and the way you intend.

Call Extensions

Call extensions allow your phone number to display directly in the ad. AdWords does not allow you to put phone numbers in your ad text, so if your business relies on customers to call in, this is a great resource. Call extensions can also be scheduled to show only at certain times of the day (so you can set them up to show only when someone will be there to answer the phone).

To set up call extensions, select Call Extensions from the View drop-down menu under the Ad Extensions tab. They are very simple to set up, only requiring your phone number.

When setting up new call extensions, you have a few features to pick from – the main one being whether to utilize Google forwarding phone numbers. Google forwarding numbers allow you to have access to call reporting which, depending on your business, may be a good way to track AdWords conversions. Google forwarding numbers are Google’s way of charging you per call a user makes. When enabled, AdWords generates a forwarding number that will be displayed in your ads instead of your actual phone number, thus allowing Google to track calls.I suggest enabling Google forwarding phone numbers. The call data is very useful for tracking number of calls and call durations, and is worth the price of a click in most cases.

Location Extensions

Location extensions allow you to list your business’s address in your ads. There are a couple of different ways you can get your address to show. If you have a Google Places account for your business, you can link that up so your ads will pull in information directly from there. If you don’t have a Google Places account, you can manually add new addresses.

To set up, select Locations from the View drop-down menu under the Ad Extensions tab. If you have Google Places, link your account to a campaign by clicking Addresses from Google Places and selecting the correct account (if you are not already logged in you will be prompted to do so).

If you do not have Places, select Manually Entered Addresses and +New extension. You can then enter in your business information and apply it to all of your campaigns.Once entered, your address could appear in a similar format to this ad:There a few other types of ad extensions. Learn more about the various ad extensions by visiting Google’s AdWords Help Center.

After you get all of your ad extensions set up, your account should be ready to start showing ads.

Watch out next Friday for our final post on tracking the success of your AdWords account.

Feel free to ask any questions you may have in the comments.