Ad extensions have become a useful and important way to improve your search engine marketing (SEM) campaign. They help boost performance in several ways—through increased visibility, personalization, a higher click-through rate, and a lower cost per click. This translates into increased sales and a higher return on investment for the advertiser.

What Are Ad Extensions?

They are free tools that you can set up in your AdWords campaigns in order to display additional information to potential customers about the products or services you offer. As defined by Google, these “add-ons” extend your ad with extra information, giving people more reasons to choose you over the competition. They usually increase an ad’s click-through rate by a few percentage points. Extension formats include call buttons, location information, links to specific parts of your site, additional text, and much more.

How Do They Work?

To help maximize the performance of an AdWords campaign, you can select extensions to be shown in response to each individual Google search. Adding this extra content gives your ad greater visibility and prominence on the search results page. This brings you closer to getting more value from your ad.

Extensions often increase the total number of clicks and can provide visitors with additional, interactive ways to contact you, such as maps, email addresses, or phone numbers. Some types of extensions require more careful setup—these are manual extensions. Automatic extensions, on the other hand, are added automatically when AdWords estimates they will improve your performance.

Types of Extensions for Google Ads

Try to select extensions based on your main advertising goal. Here’s a list of the most common advertiser goals and the extensions that can support them:

Goal: to persuade potential customers to buy from your store. If you want to drive visitors to physical locations (such as shops or restaurants), here are a few examples of extensions you can use:

Location extensions: encourage visitors to view your business by showing them your location, with a call button and a link to a company details page that includes opening hours, photos, directions, etc.

Callout extensions: add extra text such as “free delivery” or “24/7 customer support.” Callouts can be used to encourage people to convert offline.

Goal: to persuade potential customers to contact you. If you want people to call you or send you an inquiry via text message, use call extensions or message extensions:

Call or message extensions: encourage people to call or message you about your services by adding a phone number or a call button.

Goal: to attract more conversions on your website. If you want to direct users to your website, use the following types of extensions.

Sitelink extensions: connect people directly to the pages you want them to convert on (such as “Hours” or “Order Now”).

Structured snippet extensions: showcase information you think potential customers will find valuable by selecting a predefined header (such as product or service category) and listing items.

Price extensions: display services or product categories along with their prices, so people can browse products directly from the ad.

Goal: to persuade people to download your mobile app. If you want to encourage people to download your app, use this type of extension:

App extensions: encourage people to download your app. Available globally for Android and iOS mobile devices, including tablets.

What Is the Recommended Number of Extensions?

Every advertiser should use universal extensions (sitelinks, callouts, and structured snippets). Google will use up to 4 ad extensions for any given ad auction, so make sure you have at least that many enabled per campaign.

Setting up and implementing ad extensions can be a simple and quick process, but at the same time it can be difficult to decide which extensions best fit the type of business you’re in—even if you fully understand the role of extensions themselves.

Sometimes, Google’s AdWords algorithm can make it difficult to understand how your advertising campaign will be received. Business owners and marketers sometimes feel overwhelmed by the multitude of available options, which is why they often turn to other specialists.