Ad Rank, your max CPC bid and Quality Score, right? Wrong. Ad Rank now takes into account a third component, Ad Extensions.
The Inside AdWords team recently announced an update to how they determine your ads position within the paid search results. On a never-ending quest to show people the most relevant and useful search results, Ad Extensions now plays an even more important role as part of your paid advertising.
Why? With Ad Extensions you can provide potential customers with direct access to additional information or pages on your site, whether it be a phone number, product-specific landing pages or your business location on a map. And as these extensions tend to be more helpful, the click through rate tends to be higher. A win for both your site (you get more traffic and potential customers/leads) and Google (the more clicks through to your site the more money they make).
So, all in all it seems quite logical that Ad Extensions now forms part of the Ad Rank calculation. For competing advertisers this means that should you have the same bid and quality score as a competitor, the ad with the more positive expected impact from extensions is likely to appear in a higher position. Factors such as ad relevance, CTR and the prominence of Ad Extensions will determine ‘the more positive expected impact’.
To make the most of this update, if you’re running an AdWords campaign and not using extensions it’s time to seriously take them into consideration. This handy video from Google shows how a business like Main Street Flowers uses sitelinks, call and location extensions to enhance its ads;
Be sure to bear in mind your business goals when creating your Ad Extensions, not every extension is going to be right for your business. However, used correctly Ad Extensions can improve your campaign performance.
For those unfamiliar with Ad Extensions, Google Support has a great overview of each type of extension.
Good or bad move by the team at Google? I’d love to know your thoughts.
