As enhanced campaigns continue to roll out over the next couple of months, Google is quietly making some changes to the availability of certain ad extensions – Product extensions & Social extensions. One extension has been consumed by the almighty Google Shopping machine and the other has become automated for those using the Google+ social platform. So, what does this mean for retailers using AdWords?
Product Extensions Forever Gone
Since the full launch of Google Shopping last October, the product extension feature seems to have been slowly phasing out. We hadn’t seen product extensions showing up on the results page recently. When they would show, only a text link with price would appear. So, as of May 20th, product extensions are no longer be available. For retailers, the focus is to optimize product feeds for better performance in their Product Listing Ads as Google Shopping will continue to take up massive real-estate on the first page of results.
Social Extensions Become Social Annotations
Social extensions are still available in the Legacy formatted campaigns. You can manually add this extension in the ad extensions tab. In fact, Google quotes as much as a 5-10% increase in click-through-rate for text ads with this social extension appearing.
However, this once manual extension to include your Google +1 count in text ads has now become an automated feature within Enhanced Campaigns. Google will decide when an ad is eligible with the social annotation feature.
Eligibility for social annotations includes:
- Having a verified URL associated with your Google+ Business Page.
- A matching domain for your Google+ page and your ads.
- Recent high quality posts on your Google+ Business Page.
- 100+ followers.
For the retailer with a significant social following, it is important to link your Google+ page to your website. Google will do the rest.
