How to Use Google Ads Extensions

Looking for an easy and effective way to increase your ad’s visibility and CTR?

Look no further than Ad Extensions!

Ad Extensions offer you the ability to show potential customers your phone number, address, mobile app and even your social media stats within your Google Ads campaign.

I’m going to show you how you can use ad extensions to get more from your Adwords campaign. What are ad extensions? Well, you may have noticed when you searched for certain keywords that you see some ads that have more than your typical headline, first line, second line and display URL. They have something extra. In this case, 1-800-Flowers has site links that link to specific categories of their site, like their same-day flower section and their best-selling flower section.

If you search for Staples online, you can actually subscribe to their newsletter right from Google’s front page. Now fortunately, you don’t have to be a Fortune 500 company to take advantage of these ad extensions. Actually it doesn’t cost you a dime more than a normal ad. I’m going to show you how to set that up right now.

Your first step is to make sure that you have the right settings in place when you set up a new campaign in Adwords. When you set up a new campaign in Adwords, by clicking on “Campaigns” and then adding a new search and display, search network only or display network only campaign, you want to make sure that you have all features enabled, because if you don’t, this standard campaign will actually only give you a few ad extension options and all features will allow you to take advantage of all the different ad extensions within Google Adwords.

You might be wondering, “What do I do if I already set a campaign up with standard settings and now I want to change it to all features so I can take advantage of ad extensions?” Well fortunately, that’s very easy to change. You don’t have to set up a new campaign. You can actually modify your existing campaign. To do that, head over to the campaigns area of your Adwords account and click on the campaign that you want to change. Then click on the “Settings” tab and under “Type,” if it says “Standard,” click “Edit” and change that to “All Features,” and then click “Save.” Bingo. Your campaign now has all features enabled.

Now that you have all features enabled it’s time to start rocking and rolling with ad extensions. To do that simply click on the “Ad Extensions” tab. Now I’m going to go over how to use the ad extension section of Google Adwords.

The first button, where it says “View” and then an extension, is a type of extension that you want to either look at data for or start incorporating into your ad so location extensions or extensions where you’re going to include your address, site links or, like I showed you before from 1-800-Flowers, where you can actually link to specific areas of your site. I’m going to go over how to set these up in a minute.

Segments are important if you start running ad extensions, because then you can see how different times, different networks, different devices interact with different ad extensions, and you get a good idea of what ad extensions you should use at what time or with what audience.

Columns are simply a way to customize how you view your ad extensions data, so what you’d want to do is click on “Customized Columns.” By default, it shows you the normal things, like clicks and impressions and click-through rate, and if you wanted to reorder them or take one out or add one, you can do so by dragging elements to the side, clicking “Add” or clicking “Remove” and then clicking “Apply” to apply those changes.

Finally it’s time to actually start adding extensions to our ad. By default, the view is on location extensions, because that’s the most popular type of extension, which is typically used if you’re a local business that wants to show your address to people. So if someone’s searching for bike repairs in San Francisco, you’d want to show them your address and say, “Hey, where in San Francisco?” To do that, click on “Addresses from Google Places,” then click “Plus Extension,” and then this will add the address that you have in your Google Places or your Google Plus local account into your Adwords account.

If you happen to update your address you can do so in Google Places and then it will automatically integrate the new address in your ad extension in Adwords. Once that’s set up, click on “Save.” But if you don’t have a Google Places account that’s OK. You can actually click “Manually Entered Addresses,” click “Plus Extension” and then add your address, just like you would within Google Places, except that you’re doing it within Adwords and this is the address that will show.

Once everything is set up there you might want to add call extensions. This is another popular type of extension with local brick-and-mortar businesses. I’m going to show you how to set that up. Click on Call Extensions. If you haven’t set this up before the default will say, “Call extensions setting, no setting.” What you want to do is add a phone number. To do that, click on “Edit” and if you already have a phone number in your account, like in Google Places, you can choose it here.

If not, click on New Phone Number. By default Google shows what’s known as a Google forwarding phone number and that’s important if you want to track and see how this ad extensions performing because when people call through that phone number, Google will be notified and you can know what ad they used to call the number from, if they happen to click on it from a mobile device you can see how long the conversation lasts. Things like that.

If you don’t want to do that just click on My Own Phone Number and then you just add your own phone number here. Once everything looks good, click on “Save” and you’ll have call extensions all set up.

Next, I’m going to show you how to set up an offer extension. To do that, choose “Offer Extensions” from the drop down menu. Then click “Edit” and then add an offer by clicking the “New Offer” button. Here’s where you add information about your offer, like a headline, what type of discount it is, an image, if you’re going to use this offer in a display network, things like that. Once everything’s set up, you want to click “Save,” and you’ll have an offer ad extension added to your account.

Now it’s time to go over how to set up site links. To do that choose “Site Links Extensions” from the drop down menu, click “Edit” and then “New Site Link.” Here, you can add link text, which is basically the anchor text of your site link, the URL, whether or not you want to show those site links on mobile devices and a description. Once you have one set up, click on “Save” and the site link will be added here. You want to repeat that process until you have at least four site links, so then you can pick and choose different site links for different ads. Once everything is all set up, click on “Save” and then you’ll be able to show site links with your ads.

Next it’s time to go over social extensions. To set that up, choose “Social Extensions” from the drop down menu. Click “Plus Extension” and then you simply add the URL of your Google Plus page here and click “Save” and you’ll be good to go. If you have a lot of activity on your Google Plus page, particularly a lot of pluses, that will display on ads when people search for certain keywords.

Now that you have social extensions set up, it’s time to start working on dynamic search ad extensions. While this sounds a bit complicated, it’s actually really straightforward. It’s basically where Google chooses content on your site to show depending on what people search for. To set that up, click on “Dynamic Search Ad Extensions,” then click “Plus Extension,” and then just add your website domain and your language. You put something like “Backlinko.com,” click on “Save,” and you’re good to go.

Finally, I’m going to go over app extensions, which is nice if you happen to have a mobile app. To use it, just choose “App Extensions” from the drop down menu, click on “Edit.” Click on “New App” and then enter information about your app. So if your app runs on Android, you want to keep this here, but if you run on Apple mobile devices, you’d want to choose iOS and then enter the app ID.

That’s all there is to ad extensions. As you can see, there are a ton of options here, but the most important thing is to choose the ad extension that makes sense for your site and your business, and most importantly, to test to see which ones are actually getting you more results.