If you are not leveraging Google’s Ad Extensions in AdWord’s, you should take a look at why you should.

What are Ad Extensions?

“Ad extensions expand a standard text ad with one or more lines that provide additional information such as an address and phone number (location extensions and call extensions), more page links (ad sitelinks), and product images (product extensions). Sitelinks allow advertisers to include additional page links on qualifying text ads that appear on Google.com and Google Search Network partners. This extension is available globally on ads that meet our quality requirements. The most common campaigns to qualify for the Sitelinks feature are high-quality campaigns that contain keywords and ads specific to your brands.” – Google,  https://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=141826

To access Ad Extension go to your drop-down arrow at the far end of your Adwords tabs  (which include Campaign, Adgroups, Keywords, Ads, Networks, etc..) and select Ad Extension from the 2nd check-box.

With this new tab you now have access to Phone Extensions & Site-link Extensions as well as being able to link your AdWord’s account to to your Google places (Location Extensions), Google Merchant Center/Products (Product Extensions)

For the sake of this post, we will only be focusing on Sitelinks.

Select a campaign and add a new sitelink.  You are allowed 1-10 additional links which may appear below your ad.

For Example:

(Names have been replaced with XYZ for privacy reasons)

Notice how this ad “pops” with the additional line of text and also encourages the searcher to refine their results through your ad & show direct-link related offerings.

Does it work?  You be the judge:

(May 2011)

Those are some fantastic CTR results with very little effort to create – You can even add them in the Google AdWords Editor.

Other sitelink ideas:

• Services > Specials > Contact Us
• Men’s > Women’s > Children’s
• Brands > Part# Search > RFQ
• Debt Calculator > Programs >Testimonials

ad extensions, Google AdWords, sitelinks

Google is offering a $100 advertising credit for exisiting customers for the Holidays.  This is in effort to encourage people to install conversion tracking on their account.  But fear not, if you already have this installed on your site Google is still extending the offer (Until Feb. 15th 2011) to all customers.

Sign up at on this link: https://services.google.com/fb/forms/holidaypromo2010

Adwords, credit, free, promo code

Engine Ready and SEOmoz will be hosting an SEO meetup in downtown San Diego on Tuesday night, December 21st.  Come on out to learn about the latest developments in the SEO world, and to see some short presentations.  SEOmoz CEO, Rand Fishkin, and Engine Ready CEO, Jamie Smith, will be there among other professionals to network with.

The event will be held at the San Diego Beer Company, located at Broadway and 6th Ave.  For more information check out the SEOmoz event calendar or Eventbrite. And by the way, if for some reason you need more incentive to come, the first two drinks are complimentary.

*Update:  The event is listed as sold out on Eventbrite, but please register for the wait list as more spots will be opening up.

Engine Ready, Industry Events, search marketing, SEO, SEOmoz

A fairly new addition to the current selection of Tools in Google AdWords is the Experiment BETA.

The next time you are editing your campaign settings take a look and see if your account has been selected for the Beta release of “Experiment” – If you expand this feature in your campaign settings, a list of 4 steps will expand which explain how to design a test:

1. Specify experiment settings.
2. Make experimental changes to bids, keywords, and ad groups in your campaign.
3. Start experiment. As traffic accumulates, statistically significant differences may emerge.
4. Evaluate experiment. Apply changes fully or remove changes.

Before we get into how exactly to create an Experiment let’s talk about what it actually does and possible reasons to utilize it.

Campaign experiments allow you to segment traffic to keywords by max bid. For example, you have a keyword in the 4.5 position with a $0.30 bid. Campaign experiments give you the ability to take a % of total traffic and have it run with a different bid. In this example, you can pull 20% of this keywords traffic and modify the max bid by a certain percentage; let’s say 50%. This means that 1 in 5 impressions will be running off of a $0.45 bid as opposed to a $0.30 bid. By using this you discovered that if you bid $0.45 all the time, you can be shown in the 2.6 position. Along with these changes you can see side-by-side performance changes in CTR, CPC, Conversion Rate, etc…

By using this experiment you can effectively test bidding strategies with keywords without worrying about peaks and valleys in daily/weekly/monthly search patterns because they run congruently.

Now… Back to the 4 steps:

Step 1 – Click the [+ Specify experiment settings]. This will open up a new menu. Specify the Name, Control/Experiment split or how much traffic you want going to your original bid vs. your experiment bid, and Start/End dates. Click Save.

Step 2 – Go to your keywords. In the tool bar below the Keyword Tab, you will see Segment. Open this an select Experiment. You will now see a Test Tube icon next to your keyword. Edit your keyword and now you will be able to modify your Experimental Bid.

Step 3 – Once you are done setting up your bids, return to the campaign settings and select “Start Running Experiment”

Step 4 – Based on the results you will see side-by-side on the Keywords tab, you can apply the bid changes or delete them.

Google provides the tools, it’s up to us to figure out how to best utilize them. Has anyone else found a unique way of using this feature to optimize their account? Please post your findings.

adwords experiment