AdWords Ad Extensions Eligible to Show on Call-Only Ads
If you've been in the pay per call game for awhile, you probably remember the days when call-only ads on AdWords pretty much sucked. Your tiny ad with 70 characters of text would get stomped into the ground (in terms of CTR) by Expanded Text Ads with two 30 character headlines AND 80 characters for the description.
On top of getting very little space for your ad text, ETA ads were also eligible for a number of different ad extensions, further expanding the search real estate their ads took up.
Don't get me wrong, call-only ads were still profitable. It's just that your best performance was being held back by the AdWords limitations. Only in rare circumstances could your call-only ad achieve a click-though-rates comparable to what ETA ads were capable of.
Google must have finally listened to their advertiser complaints, as just this past September AdWords has rolled out the ability to use 3 extensions with your call-only ads - location extensions, callout extensions, and structured snipped extensions.
Location Ad Extensions
Location extensions help searchers on AdWords know where your business is located by showing your address, a map to the business, or the distance to your business.
Location extensions would be amazing for local offers, but unfortunately, as affiliates, we can't use them. In order to use them, you'd have to have a verified Google My Business Account, which has a verification process.
Now you pretty much need to be the physical business to be able to use them, as many people have abused them in the past. I'm sure however someone figured out the black hat way to do it by now.
Structured Snippet Ad Extensions
Structured snippets help to give the searcher a little bit more information about your product or service. They show beneath the ads with a header (ex:"Services:") and a list of values.
There are a handful of available headers you can use on AdWords.
They too sound great, but unfortunately, I've been unable to get these to get any kind of significant amount of impressions. In one campaign where extensions received over 20,000 impressions, only 32 impressions were for structured snippets.
Callout Ad Extensions
Callout extensions seem to be showing the most often on AdWords. They can boost your clickthrough rate by letting you add additional 25-character text snippets to your ads.
Bigger ads almost always = higher CTR.
When I spy on other affiliate's call-only ads, many times I don't see a majority of them using callout extensions. There is no reason why you shouldn't use them.
If you add some to your account/campaign they won't show up every time your ad shows. AdWords chooses the best time to show them to the searcher based on a number of factors, so you may as well add them to all your campaigns and let AdWords show them automatically at the times they deem best.
