Google Making Big Changes to Ad Extensions This Month

If you currently use PPC Google Search ads as a traffic source for affiliate marketing, new changes are coming that could soon affect your ad performance.

When deploying search ads, its recommended that you utilize some form of ad extensions.  

If you’re a beginner to PPC and unfamiliar with them, they’re simply additional information that appears under your primary ad headline and copy. They can take the form of:

• Sitelinks
• Callouts
• Structured snippets
• Call extensions
• Lead form extension
• Location extension

Their most common usage is for sitelinks, which appear as small blue links at the bottom of an ad:

Creating ad extensions for your search ad has a couple of benefits:

• Expands the size of your ad which increases your visibility on Google’s SERP.
• Allows you to feature more details about your company which can entice more clicks.

Google has even reported that the use of at least four ad extensions under your main ad can increase CTR by 20% on average.

Google can also automatically generate ad extensions for you, which is where things get interesting with this recent change.

Manual and Automated Extensions to Now Co-Exist

Later this Month, Google’s automatically generated ad extensions will begin to appear alongside ones you manually created.  

Historically, if advertisers were using manual extensions like sitelinks and callouts, Google’s automated versions would never appear. There was no way to test both types of extensions simultaneously.

Come Mid-March, you’ll be giving Google permission to create and display their own extensions if it’s predicted to improve your performance and if you’re opted-in.

An additional change coming with this is update is that ad extensions at ad group, campaign, and account levels can now show simultaneously. Ad group extensions would previously overrule the other types.  

What this Means for Advertisers

Ultimately, this change will provide advertisers with more options and combinations when it comes to deploying ad extensions. It’s allowing Google more variables to test to determine effective ad combinations.

However, you should now make it a point to regularly check the site extensions google has automatically created.

Although in most cases it’s best to let Google’s AI do its thing, it’s possible that that you may find some of them unsuitable for your ad. In that case, you can then easily pause the ones that aren’t a fit.

Viewing and Opting-in to Automated Extensions

You can view which extensions Google has automatically created under the ‘Source’ column once clicking on the ‘Extensions’ tab on the left side-panel.

To see if you’re opted-in to Automated Extensions go to the ‘Extensions’ tab on the left side-panel and then to ‘Automated Extensions’ at the bottom of the page. From there, just click on ‘More’ on the far-right column and go to ‘Advanced Settings’. You’ll now see what extensions you’re opted-in to and can decide to stop any or all types.