Callout Extensions were released around September last year, which means they were released eons ago when it comes to measuring time on the internet. However, everyday we come across advertisers who are still not taking advantage of them.
If you’re not familiar with callout extensions, they are similar to sitelinks, but without the links. Google’s recommendation is that advertisers use callout extensions to attract potential customers with unique selling points, important product details and benefits. Callouts are limited to four per ad, each limited to 25 characters, with a minimum of two callouts in order for them to display with your ads.
Callout extensions can be used in conjunction of other ad extensions, like sitelinks or location. They can also be controlled at the account, campaign or ad group level, which gives you the flexibility to use general callouts for your account or more specific callouts for each ad group.
Why use them isn’t really the question, but why not? You should be taking advantage of any tool that Google gives you to have the edge over your competitors. The use of extensions is proven to increase performance of ads, including click-through rate. Every extension that displays makes your ad larger and more easily seen in all the clutter.
Reasons To Use Callout Extensions:
- Promote that USP you’ve been working on so hard
- Take that USP out of your ad text, put it in a callout and voila! You have more room for ad text
- Using extensions is a factor google uses in Ad Rank calculation and can help increase your average position
- Callouts can be optimized for mobile or opt out of displaying them on specific devices
- The display time of day, day of week or dates can all be controlled for callouts
- There’s no additional cost to add callout extensions to your campaigns
Sign into your AdWords account and give them a try but keep these tips in mind.
- Keep your text short. This increases the amount of callouts that can be shown. Google refers to callouts as bullet points, rather than a full sentence. Example: “Free Shipping” instead of “ We have free shipping.”
- Be specific if you can. Try using specific details to help a potential customer decide whether your site is going to contain the info they’re looking for.
- Callout extensions are only available for “Search Network Only” and “Search Network with Display Select” campaigns.
- You can not use unnecessary symbols or punctuation like exclamation marks, punctuation at the beginning of the text, repeated punctuation, or emoticons.
- Callout text duplication is not allowed. That means you cannot have the same text in your ad that is in your callout extension.
