SEO
PPC Ad Extensions You Should Be Using Today
Ad extensions maximize your visibility in search engine results.
Here’s how Image Extensions, Structured Snippets, Price Extensions, and Call Extensions can help.
Not all ad extensions are created equal and they serve different marketing purposes.
Whether it’s on Google Ads or Microsoft Ads, ad extensions can help maximize your visibility in the search results and improve ad performance.
Ad extensions also allow for additional or more detailed messaging that doesn’t fit in the base ad copy, even with the new RSA format.
Don’t miss this opportunity.
Explore four PPC ad extensions you should be using today.
1. Image Extensions
Image extensions are available worldwide.
Consumer’s visual experience when browsing products and services online have become more critical in recent years.
Image extensions help to create a more visually appealing search ad to engage with potential customers.
These extensions enhance the relevance of your search ad by including images of your products or services in the ad.
Image extensions appear on both desktop devices and mobile devices.
These images are not banner ads and need to follow requirements in terms of content, quality, etc.
You select images to upload to be served along with ad text.
Another option is to use Dynamic image extensions which select the most relevant images from your ad’s landing page and insert them into your ad.
Once you’ve opted into this feature, images from the landing pages will be included as ad extensions in your campaigns.
To begin using dynamic image extensions, navigate to the Extensions tab of your account and click on Add dynamic image extensions.
No images, no problem!
You can create image extensions using stock images.
Now, you can select from a range of stock images provided by Google. Navigate to the Image Options drop-down menu and select Stock Images.
After that, choose the image that you think is most relevant to your ad.
2. Structured Snippets
Structured Snippets are the “no brainer” of ad extensions.
They list specific aspects of your product or service.
It is one of the simplest ad extensions to create because there is a predefined “header” for values and you don’t need landing pages because they don’t link to the website.
Each snippets extension has a “heading” such as:
- Amenities.
- Brands.
- Destinations.
- Degree programs.
- Courses.
- Featured hotels.
- Insurance coverage.
- Neighborhoods.
- Service catalogs.
- Models.
- Show.
- Styles.
- Types.
After selecting the header, enter the values – such as “free WiFi” or “pool” for amenities.
These extensions show frequently on both platforms.
Here’s an example of a company’s brand:
This simple ad extension can add value by giving the searcher more information and differentiating your ad from competitors who are not using this extension.
3. Price Extensions
Price extensions are a great alternative for advertisers that don’t have product feeds and can benefit from showcasing products and services with price points.
Price extensions are presented in the search results below the main ad text and can be useful in attracting greater attention to the ad as well as driving to deeper content on the advertiser’s website.
A minimum of three and up to eight items, or cards, can be added per price extension.
A searcher can then scroll through and click on items individually to view.
Similar to the structured snippets, Google has predefined types of price extensions:
- Brands.
- Events.
- Locations.
- Neighborhoods.
- Product categories.
- Product tiers.
- Service categories.
- Service tiers.
- Services.
Each card has a header and description of 25 characters each, appearing above and below the price.
The advertiser also has the opportunity to use a price qualifier.
This is designed for products or services that don’t have one set price point, so “from”, “up to”, and “average.”
For example: “Monday Dinner Specials from $35.”
These extensions can be added to the account, campaign, or ad group level.
Adding to the ad group level is a great place for more detailed items to be tailored to a subgroup.
For example: “European vacations” vs. “French vacations.”
These ad extensions can also be scheduled for a start and end date, along with custom hourly scheduling.
Do I hear a seasonal promotion coming on with price extensions?
I think so.
4. Call Extensions
Call extensions serve a phone number with your ads that redirect to the official phone number.
These are still highly relevant as an ad tactic as mobile has become the primary device for many searchers.
Advertisers who have avoided call extensions in the past should take a second look.
Besides connecting searchers directly with the business by phone call, using the PPC platform’s forwarding numbers will show call information, call conversions, and valuable search data on how people are finding the phone number.
Did you know?
You can turn on call recording and get recorded phone calls from ads that Google saves for 30 days.
In the following screenshot that blurs private data, the callers’ phone number is listed, the area code, and a full recording of the call.
A phone call can be counted as a conversion, defined by the number of seconds a caller is on the phone call.
The number of seconds should be defined based on each business’s unique phone behavior for closing callers.
If phone call lengths are below this threshold too frequently, or many calls are missed, it’s a good time to review a few simple optimization ideas:
- Are too many “wrong” numbers coming through? This could be due to the ad being triggered by different business names or competitors based on keywords. Check the search queries and ask phone reps what they have been hearing from callers. These keywords can be used as negative keywords.
- Too many missed calls? Ensure the ad is scheduled during business hours only when someone is available to answer that call. That could mean not running ads during the lunch hour, for example.
- Calls from physical locations not serviced by your business? This is usually just a case of adjusting geotargeting to be more accurate. Although, it could present an opportunity to learn more about these callers and the current market demand.
Bonus: Automated Extensions + Manual Ad Extensions
When you opt into automated extensions, Google Ads will create extensions on your behalf and show them with your ad if they’re predicted to improve your performance.
These automated extensions will now be eligible to show alongside their manually-created counterparts.
Google Ads is rolling out several new improvements that make sitelinks, callouts, and structured snippets easier to manage.
When you create sitelinks, callouts, and structured snippets, you can add them at the ad group, campaign, or account level.
This will make it easy to review and manage the extensions that Google Ads creates on your behalf.
To see which automated extensions are shown with your ads, look for “Automatically created” extensions in the table view of the Extensions page.
Final Thoughts
Ad extensions can be critical to rising above the competition in search results with more visibility and strategic messaging.
It’s important to review ad extensions and audit them on a scheduled basis (try quarterly) to ensure you are learning about new opportunities available and revisiting old ones.
More resources:
Featured Image: Top Popular Vector/Shutterstock
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SEO
YouTube Extends Shorts To 3 Minutes, Adds New Features
YouTube expands Shorts to 3 minutes, adds templates, AI tools, and the option to show fewer Shorts on the homepage.
- YouTube Shorts will allow 3-minute videos.
- New features include templates, enhanced remixing, and AI-generated video backgrounds.
- YouTube is adding a Shorts trends page and comment previews.
SEO
How To Stop Filter Results From Eating Crawl Budget
Today’s Ask An SEO question comes from Michal in Bratislava, who asks:
“I have a client who has a website with filters based on a map locations. When the visitor makes a move on the map, a new URL with filters is created. They are not in the sitemap. However, there are over 700,000 URLs in the Search Console (not indexed) and eating crawl budget.
What would be the best way to get rid of these URLs? My idea is keep the base location ‘index, follow’ and newly created URLs of surrounded area with filters switch to ‘noindex, no follow’. Also mark surrounded areas with canonicals to the base location + disavow the unwanted links.”
Great question, Michal, and good news! The answer is an easy one to implement.
First, let’s look at what you’re trying and apply it to other situations like ecommerce and publishers. This way, more people can benefit. Then, go into your strategies above and end with the solution.
What Crawl Budget Is And How Parameters Are Created That Waste It
If you’re not sure what Michal is referring to with crawl budget, this is a term some SEO pros use to explain that Google and other search engines will only crawl so many pages on your website before it stops.
If your crawl budget is used on low-value, thin, or non-indexable pages, your good pages and new pages may not be found in a crawl.
If they’re not found, they may not get indexed or refreshed. If they’re not indexed, they cannot bring you SEO traffic.
This is why optimizing a crawl budget for efficiency is important.
Michal shared an example of how “thin” URLs from an SEO point of view are created as customers use filters.
The experience for the user is value-adding, but from an SEO standpoint, a location-based page would be better. This applies to ecommerce and publishers, too.
Ecommerce stores will have searches for colors like red or green and products like t-shirts and potato chips.
These create URLs with parameters just like a filter search for locations. They could also be created by using filters for size, gender, color, price, variation, compatibility, etc. in the shopping process.
The filtered results help the end user but compete directly with the collection page, and the collection would be the “non-thin” version.
Publishers have the same. Someone might be on SEJ looking for SEO or PPC in the search box and get a filtered result. The filtered result will have articles, but the category of the publication is likely the best result for a search engine.
These filtered results can be indexed because they get shared on social media or someone adds them as a comment on a blog or forum, creating a crawlable backlink. It might also be an employee in customer service responded to a question on the company blog or any other number of ways.
The goal now is to make sure search engines don’t spend time crawling the “thin” versions so you can get the most from your crawl budget.
The Difference Between Indexing And Crawling
There’s one more thing to learn before we go into the proposed ideas and solutions – the difference between indexing and crawling.
- Crawling is the discovery of new pages within a website.
- Indexing is adding the pages that are worthy of showing to a person using the search engine to the database of pages.
Pages can get crawled but not indexed. Indexed pages have likely been crawled and will likely get crawled again to look for updates and server responses.
But not all indexed pages will bring in traffic or hit the first page because they may not be the best possible answer for queries being searched.
Now, let’s go into making efficient use of crawl budgets for these types of solutions.
Using Meta Robots Or X Robots
The first solution Michal pointed out was an “index,follow” directive. This tells a search engine to index the page and follow the links on it. This is a good idea, but only if the filtered result is the ideal experience.
From what I can see, this would not be the case, so I would recommend making it “noindex,follow.”
Noindex would say, “This is not an official page, but hey, keep crawling my site, you’ll find good pages in here.”
And if you have your main menu and navigational internal links done correctly, the spider will hopefully keep crawling them.
Canonicals To Solve Wasted Crawl Budget
Canonical links are used to help search engines know what the official page to index is.
If a product exists in three categories on three separate URLs, only one should be “the official” version, so the two duplicates should have a canonical pointing to the official version. The official one should have a canonical link that points to itself. This applies to the filtered locations.
If the location search would result in multiple city or neighborhood pages, the result would likely be a duplicate of the official one you have in your sitemap.
Have the filtered results point a canonical back to the main page of filtering instead of being self-referencing if the content on the page stays the same as the original category.
If the content pulls in your localized page with the same locations, point the canonical to that page instead.
In most cases, the filtered version inherits the page you searched or filtered from, so that is where the canonical should point to.
If you do both noindex and have a self-referencing canonical, which is overkill, it becomes a conflicting signal.
The same applies to when someone searches for a product by name on your website. The search result may compete with the actual product or service page.
With this solution, you’re telling the spider not to index this page because it isn’t worth indexing, but it is also the official version. It doesn’t make sense to do this.
Instead, use a canonical link, as I mentioned above, or noindex the result and point the canonical to the official version.
Disavow To Increase Crawl Efficiency
Disavowing doesn’t have anything to do with crawl efficiency unless the search engine spiders are finding your “thin” pages through spammy backlinks.
The disavow tool from Google is a way to say, “Hey, these backlinks are spammy, and we don’t want them to hurt us. Please don’t count them towards our site’s authority.”
In most cases, it doesn’t matter, as Google is good at detecting spammy links and ignoring them.
You do not want to add your own site and your own URLs to the disavow tool. You’re telling Google your own site is spammy and not worth anything.
Plus, submitting backlinks to disavow won’t prevent a spider from seeing what you want and do not want to be crawled, as it is only for saying a link from another site is spammy.
Disavowing won’t help with crawl efficiency or saving crawl budget.
How To Make Crawl Budgets More Efficient
The answer is robots.txt. This is how you tell specific search engines and spiders what to crawl.
You can include the folders you want them to crawl by marketing them as “allow,” and you can say “disallow” on filtered results by disallowing the “?” or “&” symbol or whichever you use.
If some of those parameters should be crawled, add the main word like “?filter=location” or a specific parameter.
Robots.txt is how you define crawl paths and work on crawl efficiency. Once you’ve optimized that, look at your internal links. A link from one page on your site to another.
These help spiders find your most important pages while learning what each is about.
Internal links include:
- Breadcrumbs.
- Menu navigation.
- Links within content to other pages.
- Sub-category menus.
- Footer links.
You can also use a sitemap if you have a large site, and the spiders are not finding the pages you want with priority.
I hope this helps answer your question. It is one I get a lot – you’re not the only one stuck in that situation.
More resources:
Featured Image: Paulo Bobita/Search Engine Journal
SEO
Ad Copy Tactics Backed By Study Of Over 1 Million Google Ads
Mastering effective ad copy is crucial for achieving success with Google Ads.
Yet, the PPC landscape can make it challenging to discern which optimization techniques truly yield results.
Although various perspectives exist on optimizing ads, few are substantiated by comprehensive data. A recent study from Optmyzr attempted to address this.
The goal isn’t to promote or dissuade any specific method but to provide a clearer understanding of how different creative decisions impact your campaigns.
Use the data to help you identify higher profit probability opportunities.
Methodology And Data Scope
The Optmyzr study analyzed data from over 22,000 Google Ads accounts that have been active for at least 90 days with a minimum monthly spend of $1,500.
Across more than a million ads, we assessed Responsive Search Ads (RSAs), Expanded Text Ads (ETAs), and Demand Gen campaigns. Due to API limitations, we could not retrieve asset-level data for Performance Max campaigns.
Additionally, all monetary figures were converted to USD to standardize comparisons.
Key Questions Explored
To provide actionable insights, we focused on addressing the following questions:
- Is there a correlation between Ad Strength and performance?
- How do pinning assets impact ad performance?
- Do ads written in title case or sentence case perform better?
- How does creative length affect ad performance?
- Can ETA strategies effectively translate to RSAs and Demand Gen ads?
As we evaluated the results, it’s important to note that our data set represents advanced marketers.
This means there may be selection bias, and these insights might differ in a broader advertiser pool with varying levels of experience.
The Relationship Between Ad Strength And Performance
Google explicitly states that Ad Strength is a tool designed to guide ad optimization rather than act as a ranking factor.
Despite this, marketers often hold mixed opinions about its usefulness, as its role in ad performance appears inconsistent.
Our data corroborates this skepticism. Ads labeled with an “average” Ad Strength score outperformed those with “good” or “excellent” scores in key metrics like CPA, conversion rate, and ROAS.
This disparity is particularly evident in RSAs, where the ROAS tends to decrease sharply when moving from “average” to “good,” with only a marginal increase when advancing to “excellent.”
Interestingly, Demand Gen ads also showed a stronger performance with an “average” Ad Strength, except for ROAS.
The metrics for conversion rates in Demand Gen and RSAs were notably similar, which is surprising since Demand Gen ads are typically designed for awareness, while RSAs focus on driving transactions.
Key Takeaways:
- Ad Strength doesn’t reliably correlate with performance, so it shouldn’t be a primary metric for assessing your ads.
- Most ads with “poor” or “average” Ad Strength labels perform well by standard advertising KPIs.
- “Good” or “excellent” Ad Strength labels do not guarantee better performance.
How Does Pinning Affect Ad Performance?
Pinning refers to locking specific assets like headlines or descriptions in fixed positions within the ad. This technique became common with RSAs, but there’s ongoing debate about its efficacy.
Some advertisers advocate for pinning all assets to replicate the control offered by ETAs, while others prefer to let Google optimize placements automatically.
Our data suggests that pinning some, but not all, assets offers the most balanced results in terms of CPA, ROAS, and CPC. However, ads where all assets are pinned achieve the highest relevance in terms of CTR.
Still, this marginally higher CTR doesn’t necessarily translate into better conversion metrics. Ads with unpinned or partially pinned assets generally perform better in terms of conversion rates and cost-based metrics.
Key Takeaways:
- Selective pinning is optimal, offering a good balance between creative control and automation.
- Fully pinned ads may increase CTR but tend to underperform in metrics like CPA and ROAS.
- Advertisers should embrace RSAs, as they consistently outperform ETAs – even with fully pinned assets.
Title Case Vs. Sentence Case: Which Performs Better?
The choice between title case (“This Is a Title Case Sentence”) and sentence case (“This is a sentence case sentence”) is often a point of contention among advertisers.
Our analysis revealed a clear trend: Ads using sentence case generally outperformed those in title case, particularly in RSAs and Demand Gen campaigns.
(RSA Data)
(ETA Data)
(Demand Gen)
ROAS, in particular, showed a marked preference for sentence case across these ad types, suggesting that a more natural, conversational tone may resonate better with users.
Interestingly, many advertisers still use a mix of title and sentence case within the same account, which counters the traditional approach of maintaining consistency throughout the ad copy.
Key Takeaways:
- Sentence case outperforms title case in RSAs and Demand Gen ads on most KPIs.
- Including sentence case ads in your testing can improve performance, as it aligns more closely with organic results, which users perceive as higher quality.
- Although ETAs perform slightly better with title case, sentence case is increasingly the preferred choice in modern ad formats.
The Impact Of Ad Length On Performance
Ad copy, particularly for Google Ads, requires brevity without sacrificing impact.
We analyzed the effects of character count on ad performance, grouping ads by the length of headlines and descriptions.
(RSA Data)
(ETA Data)
(Demand Gen Data)
Interestingly, shorter headlines tend to outperform longer ones in CTR and conversion rates, while descriptions benefit from moderate length.
Ads that tried to maximize character counts by using dynamic keyword insertion (DKI) or customizers often saw no significant performance improvement.
Moreover, applying ETA strategies to RSAs proved largely ineffective.
In almost all cases, advertisers who carried over ETA tactics to RSAs saw a decline in performance, likely because of how Google dynamically assembles ad components for display.
Key Takeaways:
- Shorter headlines lead to better performance, especially in RSAs.
- Focus on concise, impactful messaging instead of trying to fill every available character.
- ETA tactics do not translate well to RSAs, and attempting to replicate them can hurt performance.
Final Thoughts On Ad Optimizations
In summary, several key insights emerge from this analysis.
First, Ad Strength should not be your primary focus when assessing performance. Instead, concentrate on creating relevant, engaging ad copy tailored to your target audience.
Additionally, pinning assets should be a strategic, creative decision rather than a hard rule, and advertisers should incorporate sentence case into their testing for RSAs and Demand Gen ads.
Finally, focus on quality over quantity in ad copy length, as longer ads do not always equate to better results.
By refining these elements of your ads, you can drive better ROI and adapt to the evolving landscape of Google Ads.
Read the full Ad Strength & Creative Study from Optmyzr.
More resources:
Featured Image: Sammby/Shutterstock
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