Google AdWords & Callouts Ad Extension
The character limitation placed on Google AdWords text ads is perhaps the most restrictive and frustrating part of campaign creation process. At times it’s just one additional character that can mean the difference between a perfectly tailored text ad. Just last month, Google introduced the ‘Callouts’ ad extension in response to these frustrations. Callouts Extension With the ‘Callouts’ extension, campaign managers can add additional text within their Google search ads that detail core business, product
The character limitation placed on Google AdWords text ads is perhaps the most restrictive and frustrating part of campaign creation process. At times it’s just one additional character that can mean the difference between a perfectly tailored text ad. Just last month, Google introduced the ‘Callouts’ ad extension in response to these frustrations.
Callouts Extension
With the ‘Callouts’ extension, campaign managers can add additional text within their Google search ads that detail core business, product or service information. The ‘Callouts’ extension is an effective tool to communicate your business’ competitive advantages and unique selling points to potential customers.
Although relatively concise, the additional fields allows businesses to highlight the core benefits of their products or services, particularly in comparison to the surrounding competitors within search results.
The ‘Callouts’ extensions (as shown above) are limited to 25 characters, and up to four different callouts can be included within each text ad. There’s no additional cost when including ad extensions within your text ads, but you are charged as usual for the clicks to your advertisement. Google provides the ability to opt out of callouts for specific devices, as well as the ability to introduce customised callouts for users on mobile devices (e.g. “mobile friendly website”).
From a campaign management perspective, this is a highly time-efficient introduction, as callouts can be edited across the account, campaign or ad group level (without editing each single text ad). In addition, advertisers have the ability to edit their individual callouts without resetting their unique performance statistics; a huge advantage.
Benefits
This is a great tool for early adopters, and will help businesses to stand out from the crowd in months to come. By introducing additional ‘call to actions’, businesses have the ability to improve the performance and cost-effectiveness of their online advertisements. The competitive advantages you communicate are entirely up to you, and are particularly useful for benefits and promotions such as: opening hours, customer support details, price guarantees, free freight messages, product promotions and more.
Like the majority of the Google ad extensions, this is an effective means of increasing the real estate of your text ads. Additional content within your ads means you’re more visible for users, and consequently more likely to receive that click. Furthermore, Google has placed almost no limitations on this ad extension, and primarily functions as an additional description line. This is very similar to the ‘Sitelinks’ ad extensions, however it doesn’t allow (or require) additional unique URLs.
It is worth noting that Google will generally display the highest performing and most effective combination of callouts (based on click-through-rates). Google has also noted that they have seen better results (click-through-rates) with advertisers using sentences case as opposed to title case (e.g. “Free shipping” rather than “Free Shipping”).
Combining Other Ad Extensions
So how could you utilise ‘Callout’ extensions within your existing AdWords campaigns? The most effective strategy for utilising this extension is as a combination with other ad extensions. For instance, if you’re already utilising the ‘Sitelinks’ extensions for specific product categories, then you can utilise ‘Callouts’ to communicate more category-relevant information (e.g. “10% off example category).
If you’re utilising the ‘Call’ extension, then highlighting benefits such as “24/7 Customer Support” is an effective means of increasing both customer confidence and the likelihood of a click-through. Whichever strategy you implement, ‘Callouts’ are a great tool for display targeted and concise competitive advantages.
This extension is perfect for achieving that balance between informative service information and concise unique selling points. The introduction of this extension into your campaign is a great way to increase it’s average ad position, click-through-rate and visibility, while simultaneously decreasing its average cost-per-click.
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