Last week, Google launched the structured snippets ad extension for Google Adwords. This extension is quite similar to the “dynamic structured snippets” feature which Google released earlier this year, in March, which automatically pulls into ads based on the chosen website’s categories.
The new snippet extension is more flexible and gives more control to the advertiser. Instead of the content of the snippet being scraped from the site categories, the advertiser has control over what is displayed.
Improve the Context of Your Ads
Just like the callout extensions, you can use this non-clickable extension to add context to your advertisement. The extension adds a header, and a list of appropriate values, so you can give potential visitors a much better idea of whether the ad applies to them.
The idea behind the extension is to provide visitors with at-a-glance information about your products or services. This should improve not just CTR but also overall conversion rate, since the visitors who do click will be better qualified.
Ad extensions help to improve your quality score, so it is a good idea to implement them. This particular extension is easy to implement, since Google provides a handy list of headers that you can select. The only downside to the extension as it works right now is that the headers you can choose from are not customisable, so you are limited to what Google has already defined.
However, you can create snippets at the account, campaign and ad-group level. If you define an extension at those levels then the ad group level will trump the campaign level, and the campaign level will trump the account level, as you would expect.
Each value has a limit of 25 characters, and if you keep them short then you are more likely to get several different values in. Google recommends that you define four values, and requires at least three. Google allows you to define up to ten, but has not made it clear how it will rotate between values, so for now it is a good idea to put the most important attributes first.
If you want to make sure that the ads look as good as possible on mobiles, you can define mobile-preferred snippets as a device preference. These should be shorter than your desktop snippets.
Test a few different configurations to see what offers the best results for you.
