Today we’re talking about Google Ads Sitelink Extensions. We’re going to talk about the different types, what they are and how and why we use them in our Google Ads.
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I’m a Google Ads agency owner, trainer and consultant and had been working with Google Ads or AdWords for about 15 years. And without further ado, what I want to do is I want to jump right into an account and show you exactly what we’re talking about when we’re talking about Google Ads, Sitelink Extensions, and show you exactly how to use them and why we do it. Let’s go.
All right, let’s get started. I’m going to first show you some examples of what we’re talking about when we’re talking about Sitelink Extensions.
The Different Parts of the Ad
In this instance I typed in Minneapolis divorce lawyer, and as you can see, it comes up with several different options. But what I want you to take a look at is some of these different parts of the ad. Right here this is a call extension.
It’s basically the phone number that you enter in when you’re setting up your extensions that people can just look at. They can see it right away. If they’re on mobile and they push it, it will allow them to call it right away without dialing it in.
The next one are called, call-out extensions. These are different things I that you put in your ads. They’re very short, just pieces that talk about your business. As you can see, this one says BBB accredited. Book a consultation, your friends in law. It’s kind of some different, just things you want to add to it.
Sometimes people will add things like free estimates, free shipping, different things like that. The location extensions are exactly what it sounds like. Where are you located? If you have multiple locations, you can add both of those in there so people can get options, and they can click on that and be taken right to Google Maps.
Sitelink Extensions you may see sometimes, here I searched telecommunications company, and this one brought up two of them. Now you can bring up to four and they are just basically different pieces of your website. Sometimes when you do searches like these, you might see, contact us, about us, products, login, whatever it might be. But these are different Sitelink Extensions, and if you click this piece right here, you’ll be taken right to that page about the 2019 MQ Report or YA, by some page that talks about that.
Next are structured snippets. These are different things that you can add better things that talk about, like in this instance of a chiropractor. It talks about the different services that they offer and it will say something like services, and then it says they serve thyroid conditions, fibromyalgia, irritable bowel syndrome, weight loss, you get the idea.
Ad Extensions Are Not Guaranteed To Show Up At All Or Ever
Those are the five main types. Now, another thing you need to keep in mind is ad extensions are not guaranteed to show up at all or ever. Now, what determines that they show is your ad rank. And sometimes you’ll see ad extensions show up, and other times you will not.
If maybe your competition is catching up with your ads, and they’re showing really, really well, they’ve got a great click through rates. They may show more of their structured snippets. There are times when we search ads and none of the structured snippets will show up.
The More Information You Provide The Better Your Ad’s Standing
People will say, “Well, why do we even have them in the first place?” The main reason is because the more information that you provide Google, the better they are in matching your business with people who are looking for you. And the more information that you give them, the better they like your ads in your account.
Essentially you’re saying, “I’m putting in the work. I’m doing what Google wants me to do.” They’re going to give you essentially a higher quality score for your ads, because of the fact that you’ve done the work, that you filled this information out.
It really doesn’t take long. You don’t have to do it every single time. You kind of do it once per campaign, or once for your account. You can just choose those Sitelink Extensions that you want to use. Let’s go through how to set these extensions up and now what you need to do.
Once you’re in a campaign, go over and click on ads and extensions, and then click on extensions here at the top. Now, you can see this one’s got call, call outs, structured snippets, and some other ones. What I want to do is I’m going to click the blue button. Let’s start with the Sitelink Extensions.
Now, remember the Sitelink Extensions, are these ones right here. The big links that will come up. This is for a hot tub repair business, but they also do hot tub service, hot tub moving. Let’s just take our main services and do Sitelinks for them.
All right, I fill these out real quick. Let’s just say one of them, we want hot tub moving. You would also add some description lines in there as well. Competitively priced hot tub movers within a 30 mile radius of Las Vegas and you will add a URL or the link to the page of your website that would take people to that page.
Now, the big key with structured snippets is make sure that if you’re driving people to a page, you have calls to action on that page. You have a phone number right when the page loads and you also have a form where they can get a hold of you. You’ll always want to basically take people to landing pages where they really don’t have that big of a decision to make.
If they’re looking for hot tub service, they land on the page. Hey look, there’s the phone number to call, there’s a form to fill out. Here’s one for hot tub service. Hot Tub Service Professionals, on time professional and insured and the URL and you can do up to four of those. Now you can add more of them and what Google will do is they will basically swap them out and show the ones that they think are going to perform best.
But the most you can show at one time is four. And you also want to make sure you add him to your account, to your campaign or your ad group depending on where you’re adding those to. But it just defaults to account and that’s fine.
Let’s add a callout extension. And here are your callout extensions such as BBB accredited, book a consultation, your friends in law, whatever it might be. What we’ve done is we’ve done different ones like hot tub service, hot tub moving, used hot tub sales, different ones like that.
Now, you only get 25 characters to use in those, so use them sparingly. And Google will show, I believe up to four of them. Now, what we will do is we will add four of them and then we will save them, we will go back and we will add four more. But now every time we add them, we’re going to click on mobile.
Now, what that will do is it will show the better performing ones for desktop, the better performing ones in mobile, and we’ll basically split those out. Now, why do we do that is because take a look this, we’ve got two callout extensions, hot tub moving and we have them set up. One is for desktop and one is for mobile.
You can see that the one on mobile for hot tub moving is performing at one and a half percent better. However, the hot tub moving a call out extension on the desktop is actually converting quite a bit better. It’s almost converting at half the price. We can see which ones are working best, so we can pause ones that aren’t working as well.
Next, let’s do structured snippets. Structured snippets are very small pieces of these ads, kind of like right here it says services. Thyroid conditions, fibromyalgia, irritable bowel. What we can do is we can select the type so that if you have different brands in your store or different courses or degrees, you need to pick one of these. A lot of times people pick styles or service catalog, so we might enter different brands.
Let’s say brand hot tub one, brand hot tub two, brand hot tub three brand… it will show the different brands that we carry inside our ads and then you would click save. Now, what we also do is we will add those three, save them and then go add the same three and click on mobile like we did before, so we can separate which ones are working best. And just that little extra bit of work might take you another 30 seconds to do, but it really can make a big difference.
Now the next type we’re going to do is a call extension. Now, every business needs to really have this. If you have people that ask you questions, if you have a service business, anything where people might need to call you, make sure you put that in here.
Also make sure you do it twice. Enter your phone in here just like they have it, and then also do it again and make sure you click on mobile. You’re going to enter your phone number. You’re going to click save, you’re going to go back up to extensions, you’re going to add another call extension, add the same phone number, and then make sure you click on mobile.
Make Sure To Put A Call Tracking Phone Number
Now, what we usually do is we typically put a call tracking phone number in here, so that we know exactly where those calls are coming from. We have a tracking number just for advertising. We know that when somebody calls that tracking phone number, it’s forwarded right to us and we get a report saying, you know what? Your Google ads essentially drove this much traffic this month. It helps us determine where we need to put our marketing dollars.
Other Ad Extensions
Now, the next several extensions are very quick and easy, but they’re not going to apply to every business. A message extension. This is more of an advanced feature, talking about texting, different things like that. We don’t necessarily use it with a lot of businesses, just because we want to get people to fill out forms, we want them to call so we can get them on the phone or we want them to, they essentially buy a product.
The problem I see with this is a lot of people will text because they don’t want to talk to anybody. But when you have a business, you really should be trying to get people on the phone, answer their questions right away and hopefully selling them on your business.
Next one is a location extension. This is awesome if you have several locations, however you need to have those locations set up inside your Google business account, and you need to link to it. And then you can go through the locations extension set up.
Affiliate location extension. Now this is for general retailers or auto dealers. This is really works well if you have franchises, different things like that.
Price extensions. This is awesome if you have certain products that people really are coming to you for. Maybe you have five or 10 products. Maybe that’s all you sell, but you want to be able to let people know right away what your prices are. You can go in here and you can see right here, brand one $10, brand two 15 limited availability. You can go in here and fill out some information about that particular brand or price, whatever it might be to help drive people, especially if you have an e-commerce type business.
An app extension. If you have an app that you want people to download, you can select android or a iOS for Apple and you’re going to essentially put that in here and have a link for it. Or people can go right to a download page.
And lastly, you have a promotion extension. Now, this is more for if you have a ticket items where you want to say, “We’re offering $10 off or 15% off.” Essentially, what you’re saying is, we’re going to offer, let’s say 25% off of whatever item it might be and that will show up here.
Now, once again, you need to keep in mind that with these extensions are not going to show up every single time, and never have I really seen an ad where all of them have shown up at once. Google will select when and if to show these extensions, but once again you put more extensions on there, it’s going to let Google know that you do care about what’s going on in your ads. That you are putting forth the effort and it will give you a boost up over the next person, or competitor that you might have that didn’t take the time to set these up.
Which Sitelink have you found that works best for you and your business? Do us a favor, let us know in the comment section below and also make sure you let us know what industry you’re in as different Sitelinks will happen to work better sometimes in different industries.
If you’d like to learn more about Google Ads setups and how to do it correctly and make sure that you have everything set up, in the description below, you’ll find a link to our Google Ads checklist and video.
It’s a free tool and it can help you make sure that you have everything in your Google Ads set up correctly. If you liked our video, do us a favor. Hit the like button below, and over to the right hand side, you’re going to see a couple of different videos that deal with other aspects of Google Ads setup and Google Ads optimization.
Thank you for checking our post on: Sitelink Extensions for Google Ads in 2019
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