Google has recently launched a new feature to their AdWords program, which will help improve the look and feel of your PPC ads, and has been shown to improve click through rates. The feature, dubbed ‘Callout Extensions’ allow you to add additional text to the ads to draw attention to specific information about your site, service or products.
Currently this feature is available to select advertisers, but according to AdWords, it will be released for everyone over the course of the next few weeks.
When used properly, these callout extensions will allow you to strengthen your ad, and help bring more people to your site. Some examples of these callouts that Google provided were things like, “24/7 Customer Support,” or “Free Shipping,” or “Price Matching.” Your callouts can be used to draw attention to the ‘little extras’ that help to set you apart from the competition. You can see an example in this image:
Proven Effective
The Hotel company, Hilton Worldwide, has been using this feature as a beta tester for some time, with great results. Senior Search Manager, James Harrower commented on their success with this new feature saying, “In just one month after implementing callout extensions, we’ve seen a 9% increase in conversation rate.”
This is quite an impressive jump, especially for a company that has long been harnessing the power of PPC advertising.
Creating Callout Extensions
Creating callout extensions is quite simple. It is all handled from your Ad Extensions tab within the AdWords admin page. You can add in callouts either at the account level, the campaign level, or the ad group level. The details that you have to fill out are quite simple, as can be seen here:
This is a nice option since it will allow you to have general callouts, such as “20% Off Entire Site” for all your ads, and then more specific callouts that pertain just too individual products.
Each callout is limited to 25 characters, so you’ll have to do some planning to get the wording just right. You can have up to four callouts per ad.
As with all new advertising features, you’ll want to experiment with the callout extensions to see how to maximize their effectiveness. With proper split testing and analysis, however, it seems that this feature could be very beneficial for all types of companies.
