You’ve probably heard by now that there’s a new ad extension in town – structured snippets. Perhaps you’ve had some time to experiment with them, or perhaps you haven’t. With it being an avenue for some additional real estate on Google’s search results pages, it’s certainly worth investigating. Below, I’ll walk you through structured snippets, explain what they are and how you might be able to leverage them for increased performance.
What They Are
As with other ad extensions, structured snippets give our audience a deeper view of our products and services. I’ve always been a firm believer that it’s worth my time to take initiatives that further qualify my audience before they click on my ad copy. As we all know, every wasted click saved is budget that can be applied to a more qualified user. With that said, I was excited to delve into structured snippets and apply them to my accounts. As with callout extensions, structured snippets are not clickable. However, they give us another opportunity to add further detail to our ad copy, thus piquing our users’ interests a bit more.
With structured snippets, Google pre-defines certain categories in which your brand might fit into. As it’s a relatively new extension, you might not find a category that immediately makes sense. I’ve actually had that experience with a few of the accounts that I manage. However, a little out-of-the-box thinking might result in the discovery of a unique way to use structured snippets, even if it didn’t seem that way at first glance.
You can find structured snippets in the ad extensions area of your AdWords account. After clicking on “New Structured Snippet,” you’ll see a list of categories for you to choose from, including brands, amenities, destinations and more.
To get started, find the header that seems most appropriate. Unfortunately, you can’t alter the headers to fit your specific needs. Therefore, you may realize at this point that this extension doesn’t make the most sense for your account. However, if it does, you’ll then be prompted to fill in “values,” which is where you’ll get to call out the most important features of your product or service. These are limited to 25 characters and you must supply at least three.
You’ll also have the opportunity to select a device preference, as well as ad scheduling with this feature. There is no guarantee that Google will show all of the structured snippets that you’ve uploaded all the time as it’s at their discretion.
*Structured snippets in ad copy
Like all other ad extensions, structured snippets let us provide our audience with insight into our products and services that we wouldn’t be able to include within the confines of the regular ad copy. If at first you don’t believe that structured snippets are a good fit, take some time to think a little deeper and see if you have anything that fits within the pre-defined headers. You just might have a gem that you didn’t initially consider.
How Structured Snippets Help Accounts
Though not a guarantee, we typically see that ads that contain extensions tend to also see an increase in performance, especially headline CTR. We know that this can also assist in ad rank. I’ve already seen some preliminary results from the accounts where I use this extension and both the CTRs and conversion rates are higher when structured snippets are showing, as opposed to when they aren’t. That’s encouraging news and definitely a reason to continue testing different snippets and gauge their overall effect on the account.
Final Thoughts
Structured snippets are worth your time. With a quick and easy setup, there is a lot to gain in increased account performance and improved ad rank. Also, any opportunity to garner an extra line of real estate on the search results page is appealing to me! This is a small step that can have a significant effect on performance. It’s also early in the structured snippets game, so there’s still time to get in on this ad extension before your competitors do, thus showing ad copy that stands out among all the rest.
