Introducing Google Callouts

The new ad extension feature is sure to grab your attention with more space for ad copy.

Google will be implementing a new ad feature over the next few weeks: AdWords callout extensions. The new extensions live up to their name, calling out your business’s special offers, guarantees, and competitive prices to searchers who might otherwise scan your ad without knowing what sets you apart from your competition.

More Ad Space

One of the best parts of this new feature is the extra room it gives you for telling your target audience how great you are. Each callout can be 25 characters long, and each ad can have a maximum of four callout extensions. That’s a lot of space when you consider the fact that currently four ad extensions are fairly a standard.

Unlike sitelinks, callout extensions aren’t actually links — they’re just text, so they function sort of like ad copy. As Ginny Martin of Search Engine Land points out, this offers a lot of flexibility. Anyone can use them, regardless of how many pages your website has. And you have the freedom to say anything you want without having to choose a landing page that’s different than the one already linked to the ad.

Callout Logistics

Miranda Miller of Wordstream brings us a few helpful tips for manipulating this fairly simple tool. Just like with ads, you aren’t allowed to duplicate text in callout extensions. You also cannot use dynamic keyword insertion in the callouts.

She also says that Google saw higher results when advertisers did not use title punctuation and stuck to simple, short ad text that was easy to read.

Layered Targeting

You can set callout extensions at the account, campaign, or ad group level, which means that you can really get more and more specific with each item you advertise for.

Google recommends that you layer the call extensions, providing more detail for more specific searches. For instance, you might have free shipping for any order on your website, but you might be offering an additional 20% off for a specific item.

Google will choose the most successful combination of callouts for you, so come up with some options to test.

You can also set up the callouts specifically for mobile to hyper-target the large portion of search traffic to be had from non-PC users — a move highly recommended for service industries, where people are just looking for a phone number. The callouts will have some people price-shopping on the front page of Google rather than perusing price pages for, say, a plumber or taxi cab, so listing a special offer that stands out from the ad text could really make the difference when it comes to getting more business.

You can add the callout extensions alongside other ad extensions or limit your ad extensions to callouts only.

Measurability & Attribution

As with all AdWords tools, be smart — if people don’t respond well to one of your callout extensions, focus on the callouts they do like. Make sure you are paying attention to which extensions bring the in the most business and do what you can to be more competitive with your ads. Callout extensions can be a PPC management tool as well as a business tool.

Low CTRs? We see all the time how a special offer included in ad text can turn around a low CTR, especially if the competition is high. Callouts give advertisers even more bargaining power to help boost their ad statistics and quality scores, because no one wants to pay more per click.

What People Are Saying

It will be interesting to see what this does for business competition, since searchers will now have increased ability to shop deals without even leaving the first page of Google. But according to PPC Hero’s Cassie Oumedian, the results are clear: they did the beta-test for an Ecommerce client over thirty days and saw a 221% increase in CTR.

And let’s be real, one of our favorite types of new AdWords tools are the kind that we already know how to use. All you have to do to use callout extensions is go under ad extensions in AdWords settings and follow the instructions for entering callout text — pretty easy!

Interested in getting in on the beta? Contact us for more information.