Here are ten keys to Google Ads Grants success for non-profits:

1. Conduct Thorough Keyword Research: Keyword research is essential for any Google Ads campaign, but it is particularly important for non-profits that are limited to a $2.00 maximum bid per keyword. Identify relevant keywords with high search volume and low competition to maximize your chances of getting clicks within your budget. Use tools like Google Keyword Planner to discover keyword ideas and bid strategically on keywords that align with your non-profit’s goals and mission.
2. Use Image Assets for Search Text Ads: Google Ads Grants allows non-profits to use image assets in their search text ads, which can make your ads more visually appealing and engaging. Take advantage of this feature by creating compelling images that convey your message effectively. This can help you stand out from the competition and increase your click-through rates (CTR).
3. Create New Campaigns Every Month: Google Ads rewards new campaigns with higher CTRs. Regularly create new campaigns and ad groups to keep your ads fresh and relevant. This can help improve your Quality Score and increase the visibility of your ads, resulting in higher click-through rates and better performance.
4. Remove Keywords with Low Quality Scores: Low-quality keywords can harm your campaign’s performance and increase your cost per click (CPC). Remove any keywords with a 2 or lower quality score to improve your campaign’s relevance and effectiveness.
5. Check Your Campaigns Daily: Regularly monitoring and optimizing your campaigns can help you identify issues or opportunities and make necessary adjustments to improve your performance. Check your campaigns daily to identify any underperforming keywords or ads and make necessary adjustments. Optimize your ad copy, landing pages, and bids to improve your campaign’s effectiveness and increase your CTR.
6. Make Major Updates Once per Month: Google Ads takes time to learn and optimize your updates. Avoid making too many changes to your campaigns too frequently, as it may disrupt the learning process. Instead, make major updates once per month to allow Google’s algorithms to adapt and optimize your campaigns for better performance.
7. Maintain a High Click-Through Rate (CTR): Google Ads Grants has a requirement of a minimum 5% CTR. If your CTR falls below this threshold, your account may be at risk of suspension. Focus on creating relevant and compelling ads, using targeted keywords, and optimizing your campaigns to maintain a high CTR and ensure the longevity of your account.
8. Check Google’s Recommendations and Keep It at 100%: Google provides recommendations and feedback on your campaigns’ performance and opportunities for improvement. Check Google’s recommendations regularly and make necessary changes to keep your campaigns at 100%.
9. Maintain high Landing Page Experience and Ad Relevance Scores: Google’s algorithm considers landing page experience and ad relevance when ranking ads and determining CPC. Make sure your landing pages are relevant and provide a positive user experience to increase engagement and improve your Quality Score.
10. Use a Google Ads Account for Highly Competitive Keywords: In some cases the keywords you want/need to bid on cannot be achieved under the Google Ads Grants $2.00 maximum bid per keyword. In those cases, some of our clients maintain a hybrid approach of maximizing what they can do with their Google Ads Grants account and supplementing with a Google Ads Account to bid on the keywords that fall outside of the $2.00 maximum bid per keyword range.

In conclusion, by following these ten keys to Google Ads Grants success for non-profits, organizations can effectively leverage the advertising grant to achieve their online marketing objectives. Conduct thorough keyword research, use image assets, create new campaigns, remove low-quality keywords, check your campaigns daily, make major updates once per month, maintain a high CTR, check Google’s recommendations, and maintain a high landing page experience and ad relevance to maximize the benefits of Google Ads Grants.

Need help with your Google Ads Grants or Google Ads account? Contact Us for a free consultation.

Author:

Andy Hoover
Manager, Search Engine and Social Media Marketing
Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc.

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About Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc.

Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc., is known for bringing the latest marketing strategies to online and direct marketing. Beasley provides services in inbound and outbound marketing including: content creation, email marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), print advertising, social media advertising, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, Amazon Marketing Services (AMS), website design, media planning/public relations, direct mail marketing, lead generation and nurture campaigns, and database management. Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc., helps clients in both B2B and B2C marketing and is privately held and headquartered in the Silicon Valley suburb of Morgan Hill, California. For more information, go to www.BeasleyDirect.com.

About CMC Rescue, Inc.

For over 40 years, CMC has been developing innovative tools, education and training used by professionals in the fire service, Urban Search and Rescue (USAR), wilderness rescue, rigging, tactical and work-at-height industries. Today, the CMC brand is synonymous with technical rescue and rope access expertise around the world. As co-founders of the Society of Professional Rope Access Technicians (SPRAT), the International Technical Rescue Symposium (ITRS), and International Technical Rescue Association (ITRA), CMC remains committed to innovating across all work-at-height industries. An employee-owned company, CMC is an ISO-9001 certified manufacturing facility. For more information, visit www.cmcpro.com.

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When you search Google on the phrase “Integrating your CRM with Google Ads,” about 2.8 million results are offered. Obviously, this is a common integration issue. Having an integration checklist will help you plan your process before starting (which is the reason I wrote this blog). I hope my checklist will save you time, money and create ROI for you in the long run.

For the sake of giving examples, we’ll use Marketo as our representative Marketing Automation Platform (MAP), and explain how it connects to SalesForce (our CRM). These are not the only choices in the market, but they will serve to illustrate common opportunities and challenges.

Integration Checklist Questions

We list here a series of questions we will explore in the following sections. You might want to jot down answers to these questions first before we review each in detail.

1. Do you have a separate Marketing Automation Platform (MAP) and Customer Relationship Management system (CRM)?
2. Do your MAP and CRM systems have a clean, well-documented connection/interface?
3. Is there a direct connection to the CRM from Google Ads?
4. Are the forms on your site native to the MAP/CRM or do they pre-date it?
5. Is your campaign naming convention consistent between the MAP, CRM and Google Ads?
6. What elements do you wish to track across the three platforms?
7. How long is your sales cycle in both time and number of touches to a closed deal?
8. Do you have steps in your sales qualification process that are manual, requiring a human to make a judgement call?
9. Will there be multiple touches before the MQL is handed off to the sales team?
10. How many people will own this process?

Here are Additional Details on each Question and what they Imply

1. Do you have a separate MAP and CRM?

Some CRMs have great marketing automation built into their infrastructure and do not need the addition of a MAP. Often though, companies start with a MAP and eventually move to a full-blown CRM.

If you do not have an integrated MAP/CRM connection, budget additional time and resources to connect the two. This often can be a major hurdle in launching your campaigns. One of Beasley Direct and Online Marketing’s (BDOM) clients ran into this issue and an additional 6 weeks of development time was required to launch the campaigns.

2. Do your MAP and CRM systems have a clean, well-documented connection?

Both Marketo and SalesForce have invested time and money into creating these connections at the API level. Take advantage of this and use what’s there instead of trying to recreate the wheel.

Be sure to test the connection between the MAP and CRM before launch. In spite of having off-the-shelf solutions, BDOM has found allocating time and budget for running initial tests is key to long-term campaign and larger marketing initiative success.

3. Is there a direct connection to the CRM from Google Ads?

Is it one way or two way? Being able to send sales data back to Google Ads will make a much more efficient campaign over time. BDOM has found that where this exists the integration process is easier, and we are able to see a much more detailed view of what’s happening from click to meeting to closed sale. Be sure to spend time familiarizing both your marketing team and sales team with what results say. Having your sales team understand results goes a long way towards getting them to take online leads seriously as they allocate limited time to what they view as the best prospects.

4. Are the forms on your site native to the MAP/CRM or do they pre-date it?

It will save you time and lots of effort if you bite the bullet and convert all your forms to the native version offered by your MAP. This is probably the biggest source of frustration and delay when going through this process.

One of our clients chose to have a hybrid approach with new forms being built in Marketo and older forms being “imported” into the system. While they were able to make this work, it required additional development time when a new campaign would target the marketing collateral associated with an older “imported” form.

Spend the time and effort up front to convert older forms to your MAP. It will allow your team to be more agile and effective for future campaigns.

5. What elements do you wish to track across the three platforms?

Make sure your SalesForce campaign fields match your Google Ads fields. Also, importing your cost data into SalesForce can make your ROI much clearer at a glance.

This comes back to the idea of managing your resources effectively. We all have limited budget to drive traffic to our site, whether from paid search or email outreach. Being able to understand which traffic is driving the best leads and how much those leads are costing your company will allow your team to make better decisions on which campaigns are performing best. It also cuts down on the number of “poor” leads your sales team needs to shepherd from marketing qualified to sales qualified.

Your sales team has limited time to devote to qualifying marketing leads and will begin discounting them over time if poor leads are being sent because they appear to be “affordable.”

6. Is your campaign naming convention consistent between the MAP, CRM and Google Ads?

Keeping the naming convention consistent from the start will cut down on significant data issues. It’s easier to match them up at the outset of your integration process than going back to retrofit the data later.

One key field that needs to be included in SalesForce is the “gclid” field. This is the container that Google Ads uses to transmit all the campaign, ad group, ad, search term, targeting and cost info into a nice little package that SalesForce can decode.

7. How long is your sales cycle in both time and number of touches to a closed deal?

The more touches needed, the more you need to make sure you’re getting a clean, two-way data stream between Google Ads and your MAP/CRM.

Our team spent a lot of time and effort ensuring we are able to follow the lead stream with our clients to understand what is working. Having good, two-way communication between the eventual sale and the click that drove it is key. This can be the area in which a well-connected MAP/CRM solution pays for itself, giving the marketing team the data they need to focus on the best source of high-quality leads for the sales team.

8. Do you have steps in your sales qualification process that are manual, requiring a human to make a judgement call?

This is known as shifting a lead from an MQL (marketing qualified lead) to a SQL (sales qualified lead).

BDOM will sit down with our client’s marketing and sales teams at the beginning of any new engagement and ask how they qualify the lead, what makes for a good SQL vs. an MQL and what history the two sides have. This will often result in a better understanding on both sides and better long term buy-in to a process that may not be turnkey.

9. Will there be multiple touches before the MQL is handed off to the sales team?

Be sure that these are used to score the lead and it transmits to your CRM when the lead is transferred.

This again is a key step for getting sales and marketing on the same page in understanding the process and developing trust with the quality of the leads as they go through the pipeline.

10. How many people will own this process?

Is it just one person or are you splitting the work among different people and teams? Getting the multiple parties involved at the outset to discuss goals and possible issues is vital to having a successful process. Be aware that different team members will have different goals for the integration. Some may not want to do the work required and will need to be convinced of the final result’s value.

The ins and outs of the process will be very dependent on planning details before any steps are taken. Like any project, a road map with clear responsibilities will make your integration much more successful.

Additional links that can help you get started.

Link Salesforce and Google Ads accounts
https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/7538740

Import conversions from Salesforce
https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/6299296#setup_steps

Google Ads Integration Questions? | Marketo Marketing Nation
https://nation.marketo.com/thread/44948-google-adwords-workings

Google Ads Integration: Optimize Ads Using Marketo Offline Conversion Data
https://www.marketo.com/cheat-sheets/google-adwords-integration-optimize-ads-using-marketo-offline-conversion-data/

Do you need assistance integrating your Marketing Automation Platform and CRM with Google Ads? We can help. Request a free consultation here.

For digital marketing case studies, go here.

By John Thyfault
Vice President of Search and Social Media Marketing
Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc.

The post 10 Steps to Integrate Marketing Automation Platforms and CRMs with Google Ads appeared first on Beasley Direct and Online Marketing.

Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc., a Northern California-based full-service direct and online marketing agency, has been awarded Google Premier Partner status for achieving the highest requirements to manage client Google Ads accounts. Google Ads awarded us Premier Status based on successful client account performance, ad spend, up-to-date knowledge of and certification in Google Ads. We have specialists in Search Advertising, Display Advertising and Mobile Advertising.

About Google Ads

Google Ads is Google’s digital advertising platform that allows businesses and non-profits to reach their target audiences with their message. Google Ads offers Search, Display, Video and App ads. Ads can be targeted based on:

Audience:

• Demographics
• Affinity
• In-market
• Custom intent
• Similar audiences
• Remarketing

and/or, Content:

• Topics
• Placement
• Content keywords
• Display expansion for search

About Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc.

Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc., is known for bringing the latest marketing strategies to online and direct marketing. We provide services in inbound and outbound marketing including: content creation, email marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), print advertising, social media advertising, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, Amazon Marketing Services (AMS), website design, media planning/public relations, direct mail marketing, lead generation and nurture campaigns, and database management. We help clients in both B2B and B2C marketing and are privately held and headquartered in the Silicon Valley suburb of Morgan Hill, California. For more information, go here.

For a Free Google Ads (Pay-per-Click) PPC audit, click here.

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A Broad Match Modifier is a variation on the traditional Broad Match for your keyword matching options. They can drive an improved reach and ROI. We’ll illustrate in a case study for a community bank client later in this blog. First, some basics on how the Broad Match Modifier works.

The Broad Match Modifier as Your Ultimate Reach: How it Works

When setting up your keyword match types, Broad Match gives you the most reach and variability in the searches your ad can appear on. In addition, the keyword’s cost-per-click (CPC) tends to be lower than using phrase or exact match. For example, if you have set up the keyword “men’s shoes” as a broad match, your ad can appear whenever Google Ads thinks it’s relevant. The ad could be triggered by searches like “shoes for men,” “men’s tennis shoes,” “dress shoes for men” or “loafers for guys.” It can appear on any synonym, plural or variation Google Ads thinks is appropriate.

This results in a wide reach to a lot of different searchers. However, often times the reach is too wide and you are getting clicks (each one costing you money) from searchers who are not looking for your particular product. You are selling dress shoes and your ad is appearing in searches for tennis shoes.

Phrase and Exact Match will focus your ads to appear in front of a much more limited set of searchers. Often times, they narrow the search down too much. The result is you don’t achieve the necessary impression volume you need to reach your marketing goals. What you need is a better balance of reaching a larger audience and yet focusing in on your product – and the Broad Match Modifier affords you exactly this balance.

What is Broad Match Modifier and how does it differ from straight Broad Match?

Broad Match Modifier will allow you to maintain a larger reach for different searches, while giving you some ability to focus the searches that your ad appears upon.

When Broad Match Modifier is used, a “+” is placed in front of a keyword, telling Google Ads to include that word “as is” in the search. Then the keyword can appear in any order in the actual search query, but the modified word or a close variation (plurals, stems, etc.) must be included.

For example:

The keyphrase “+women’s hats” could trigger an ad to appear when the searcher types in “women’s caps,” “white hats for women” or “women’s red caps.” It would not appear on “girl’s hats” because the modifier keyword “women’s” (or a close variation) was not included in the search.

In addition, you can use Broad Match Modifier to modify multiple words in your larger keyphrase you are bidding on:

The keyphrase “+women’s +hats” will trigger your ad when the searchers enter “women’s hats,” “hats for women,” “women’s blue hats” or “lacy women’s hats.” Your ad would not be triggered without both “women’s” and “hats” included in the search. Remember that the order of the words does not matter. This allows for a broader reach than phrase match where the order is maintained.

Case Study: Broad Match Modifier for a Community Bank’s Google Ads Campaigns

One of our clients, a community bank, wished to target real estate investors searching for multi-family properties. After developing an initial keyword list with a split of 30% broad match, 30% phrase match and 40% exact match, the campaign was launched. We targeted three medium size cities and six counties.

After one week’s worth of traffic, we analyzed the results, both from a conversion-to-lead basis and from a search query basis. The phrase and exact match traffic was very low. The traffic we did see performed well but at too low volume to meet the client’s goals.

Broad match generated plenty of traffic volume but a very low conversion rate. When we reviewed the search queries (Search Terms Report) that were driving the clicks, we saw a lot of consumer-based traffic. Terms being bid upon, such as “apartment building loan,” were triggering the client’s ads for terms such as “loans for apartment” and “loans to buy an apartment.” Traffic from these searches would land on the site and exit after it became apparent the bank was offering loans to purchase apartment buildings, not just one apartment. The Broad Match traffic was converting to a lead at less than a 0.5% rate.

Modifying the Broad Match List

We worked with the client to modify the Broad Match list into a more focused Broad Match Modifier list. Some of the terms were updated to Broad Match Modifier, for example:

“apartment building loan” became “+apartment+building+loan.” This had our client showing up for more relevant searches, such as “loans for apartment buildings” and “loans to buy apartment building.”

Results: CTR went from 1.85% to 3.99% in the first week. Conversion rates jumped from 1.78% to 5.10%.

“financing rental units” became “financing+rental+units.” The client’s ads began showing for searches on “best rates for financing rental units” and “banks who finance rental units purchase,” among others.

Results: CTR went from 2.57% to 3.77% in the first week. Conversion rates jumped from 0.78% to 4.22%.

A Winning Campaign

Over the course of two weeks across the entire campaign, we saw the traffic from the Broad Match list (now a Broad Match Modifier list) improve its conversion-to-lead rate to 4.1% while still maintaining a strong volume. The search queries driving the clicks were much more relevant to the ideal customer profile we had developed at the start of the engagement.

We were also able to add to our Phrase and Exact Match list based on analyzing the post-change search queries. We found a series of phrases that were not originally identified and added them to the appropriate ad groups.

Broad Match Modifier allowed our client to run ads in a limited geographic area with a more specific set of targeting options that resulted in improved conversion rates.

By John Thyfault, Vice President of Search Engine and Social Media Marketing, Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc.

Read more digital marketing case studies in Resources.

Learn how our team can help manage your PPC campaigns here.

Contact us now.

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In a time when the competition for visitors driven to your site from Google AdWords is increasing, using all the tools that are available to spend your budget wisely is a must. This is particularly true for companies that have locations that are only open during certain hours. Or, if you know your searchers have a specific pattern when they’re looking for your type of company, which was the case of our franchise client. This makes time based geo targeting a critical, competitive skill for your tool set.

Getting in Front of the Right Searcher at the Right Time

There are two settings within AdWords that can allow your ads to get in front of the right searcher at the right time. AdWords allows advertisers to set-up schedules when your ads will appear in front of your potential customers. You can set schedules by time of day, day of the week and even multiple live and dark periods during a specific day. This can allow for a very targeted approach to when your ad is being displayed.

We used this to great effect for our office cleaning franchise client, by having multiple live and dark periods during the business week. The client offered janitorial service franchises on a regional basis. The potential customers that they were looking for were divided into two groups:

1. Individuals 

An individual who was already working as an office cleaner for someone else and wanted to become their own boss. This potential customer would be working after normal business hours, from 7:00 PM to 1:00 AM. They would have time to search online in the afternoon, also after 1:00 AM, and on the weekends. They were generally looking for a single unit franchise.

2. The Successful Business Person

The second customer being targeted was the successful business person who was looking to become a business owner and to make a wise investment in a franchise business. They would do online searches during normal business hours with some time spent online during Sunday afternoon.

A Unique Message for Each Targeted Customer Profile

Both customer profiles had a unique set of messages that they would respond to as well as having a different tone of voice in the ad. We created separate campaigns for the two customer segments. The campaigns were targeted to their specific times online and containing the different messaging that resonated with the segment. This improved the client’s performance in both CTR (click through rate) and CPL (cost per lead very rapidly). CTR bumped from 2.5% to 5.9% on average and the cost per lead decreased by 22% within the first month.

The Key for Campaign Performance in Multi-Time Zone or International Scheduling

The above is a very locally geo targeting scenario, being focused on a specific city or state. If this was being run out of a local AdWords account, the geo settings are a simple thing to set up. But often, an advertiser will be displaying ads across multiple time zones or even countries. This adds a wrinkle to how the schedules are set up. The following is the key to getting the campaigns to perform by ad scheduling in a multi-time zone situation. Remember that your AdWords account has a permanent time zone assigned to it when it was originally set-up. This generally matches your billing address but can be set to your choice initially. Once set though, it is unchangeable.

This can make for a bit of a challenge when setting up national or international campaigns. For example, if you are in Los Angeles and you wish to run an ad schedule for a Boston targeted campaign, you need to offset the start and end times by 3 hours to account for the time zone difference. This can quickly result in multiple campaigns that may be identical in all aspects except for the ad schedule.

Customer Profiles, Online Times and Location in Time Based Geo Targeting

Understanding the profile of individual customer segments, the times that they are online and where they are located can dramatically improve your performance. It is all about having the ads live when your customers are searching and dark when they are offline. This will result in a more qualified click on the ad and an increased likelihood to convert to a lead or a sale. AdWords gives you the tools to do this and the smart advertiser will take advantage of them to spend their dollars wisely.

Click here to view a video on AdWords targeting.

The post Improving AdWords Performance with Time Based Geo Targeting: A Case Study for a National Office Cleaning Franchise with Local Offices appeared first on Beasley Direct and Online Marketing.

Google Ad Extensions are offered in AdWords as a set of extensions intended to make your advertising more effective by refining reach and targeting. Google ad extensions also allow extra information about your business to display with your Google ad. This extra information may provide prospects with more reasons to contact your business.

The first thing to understand about Google ad extensions is they display automatically. But, only when your ad and keywords’ Quality Score allow you to appear in the top two positions in the search results. These extensions include seller ratings, consumer ratings, social extensions, and previous visits to the business’ site. Advertisers don’t have to do anything for automated extensions to appear.

Second, some Google ad extensions do not show unless your ad has achieved a high enough Ad Rank. This allows your ad to appear high enough up on the Google search results page. You earn this spot by making sure that your keywords have a high quality score. And, you are bidding enough per click to be competitive for the first two spots on the page. We’re going to cover each of the ad extension types here, and briefly discuss how to use them.

Ad extensions are available at no additional charge beyond your cost per click. So, you may as well take advantage of them. Google is not providing these tools out of charity, of course. The more successful your pay-per-click (PPC) ad is, the more money Google makes.

Google Ad Extensions

Site Links Extension

Site Links Extensions are designed to provide additional relevant links to your website beyond the one associated with the ad. One of our clients uses Site Links to point to catalogue and product support pages. This is one of the extensions you can take advantage of, But, only if you have a high quality score and appear in the first two ad spots on the search results page. Site Links show additional resources from your website, which increases click through significantly because the user may be looking for a variety of things. Furthermore, Site Links help you to showcase more of your offerings.

Figure 1: Example of Site Links Extension

Source: Google

Location Extensions

Location Extensions are designed to boost the effectiveness of local search. This is done by tying your ad to Google Maps, making your ads more relevant to the local searcher. Type in your retail locations and Google will serve up information on these locations along with the ad when somebody is searching nearby. Location Extensions are effective at driving traffic to local stores. Store location will appear within Google Map searches and help with positioning in locally based searches.

Figure 2: Example of Location Extensions

Source: Google

Call Extensions

Call Extensions allow you to add telephone numbers to your ads on an ad-group-by-ad-group basis, allowing people to call your business directly through the ad (particularly on mobile devices because of the click-to-call function). When you have a live salesperson interacting with your prospect, it makes for a more efficient sales cycle with fewer touches.

Call Extensions also allow you to collect details on length of call, area code of the call, time of day, and which campaign is associated with each call.

App Extensions

App Extensions allow you to promote your mobile app and drive customers to the website, to GooglePlay, or to the App Store for a download (note that this works with Android, but not with the Apple Store). You can use App Extensions to start the app download immediately by taking the purchaser directly to the appropriate page on the App Store or Googleplay, accommodating impulse buys of your new app.

Review Extensions

Review Extensions display reviews with your ad (but not from all sources). The best source of reviews (from Google’s perspective) is from your Google+ page, but many major ecommerce review vendors are also accepted as legitimate sources such as BazaarVoice. (Yelp! doesn’t share reviews with Google, unfortunately.) Additionally, Review Extensions can be powerful because they provide third-party endorsement of your business. Ratings stars can boost click-through.

Callout Extensions

Callout Extensions include additional descriptive text of 25 characters in standard text ads. The Callout Extensions have some restrictions with respect to trademark requirements, depending on the preferences of the trademark owners. For instance, if you sell athletic shoes and you want the callout to say, “Lowest cost Nike shoes,” your ability to use the phrase is gated by Nike’s willingness to allow their trademarked brand to be used in that context. Google enforces by exception. If somebody complains about an ad based on trademark violation, the trademarked word or phrase is removed from the allowable keyword list.

Callout Extensions are great for short-term offers or special promos. You will need to create multiple callouts for a campaign to give Google choices. The more specific the callout, the better. Be concise; two words are better than four. Google gives the example of using “Free shipping” instead of “We offer free shipping.” When composing a Callout Extension, use normal sentence case structure. The descriptions cannot feature excessive hyperbole, all caps, or exclamation points, and cannot duplicate the ad text.

Structured Snippets.

When you activate Structured Snippets, Google will review your site and look for snippets of information that apply to various sections of your site. They automatically generate these along with your ad. You have less control here than over other Ad Extensions. You can turn it off if you don’t like what Google does, but generally Google does a good job of pulling out the key points. Structured Snippets do increase click-through rates, and they also Increase the conversion percentage once prospects arrive at your page.

Figure 3: Example of an Ad with Structured Snippets

Source: Google

Why You Should Take Advantage of Ad Extensions

Ad Extensions help to improve the visibility of your ad in various ways, and you can use more than one extension with every ad, customizing these additional functions to suit the purpose of your campaigns. The extensions often appear above the search results, rather than along the sidebar. If your ad is in competition with another ad and your ad has extensions with it that add to impact and meaningful results for the user, your ad will appear higher than your competitor’s.

Ad Extensions have demonstrated higher click-through rates than ads without extensions, increasing traffic to your site by qualified customers.

Finally, Google Ad Extensions are free. This makes them one of marketing’s rare great opportunities to improve performance without increasing expenses. Who could resist a deal like that?

* * * *

John Thyfault

This post was authored by John Thyfault, Vice President of Search & Social Strategy, of Beasley Direct & Online Marketing. Contact John at jthyfault@beasleydirect.com.

The post Google Ad Extensions and How To Use Them appeared first on Beasley Direct and Online Marketing.