PPCGoogle AdWords Rolls Out Structured Snippets

Google AdWords Rolls Out Structured Snippets

Here's how Google AdWord's new ad extension, structured snippets, can optimize your advertising campaign by driving traffic, boosting CTR, and increasing conversion rates.

Last week Google released a new ad extension for AdWords – structured snippets.

This is similar to an ad extension Google released in March, dynamic structured snippets, which automatically pulled into your ads based on your website categories.

This new format offers more flexibility as the content is now controlled by the advertiser and not scraped from the site categories.

Like callout extensions, this is a non-clickable extension that allows you to add more context to your ad copy.

The text features a header, followed by a list of the appropriate values that apply.

helena-clark-snippets-ad

The overall purpose is to allow you to offer more insight into your product and services within your ad. If used well, this should help improve CTR and drive more informed traffic, which should help with conversion rates.

Ad extensions have been contributing to Quality Score for a long time now, so this is another very good reason to add them into your accounts.

There is a predefined list of headers that should be applicable to most business models:

helena-clark-snippets-header-menu
There is one downside – the headers are not customizable. It would be nice these headers could be modified, so you could tailor them to the needs of specific brands.

Structured snippets can be created at an account, campaign, and an ad group level. As with other ad extensions, the ad group level trumps the campaign level, and campaign level trumps the account level.

There are also certain things to keep in mind while generating the values:

  • Each value has a character limit of 25. As with callouts, you are likely to get more values shown if you keep them short.
  • You require a minimum of three values and Google recommends four. You can have up to 10. We haven’t seen any evidence of Google rotating these, so include your most important attributes first.
  • You can set a device preference to create mobile-preferred snippets. It is a good idea to also keep these short.
  • Like with all other ad extensions, you can set a schedule or start and end dates if needed.

 

helena-clark-snippets-setup

The extension is super easy to set up in an account and I struggle to think of accounts where they wouldn’t be suitable.

It is particularly useful if, when clicking through your site, you find yourself listing products and services in ad copy to set user expectations.

Listing products and services within description lines isn’t always ideal, because it can be difficult to utilize multiple attributes with the ad character limit.

This also takes away any opportunity to add in your business’ USPs. Google ultimately decides which extensions to show based on expected CTR, so you are not guaranteed to show all the time.

However, you will reap the most rewards by utilizing a granular ad group strategy because this will drive better quality traffic to your site.

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