Ad Extensions tab in AdWords

25.05.2010 Posted in Search

This week Google introduced an Ad Extensions tab to their AdWords interface. This goes part way towards making it a useful destination for seeing how your ads are performing when they’re running with extensions.

Ad extensions come in four flavours:

Sitelinks, where you can add additional landing pages on your site that people might choose to jump straight to.
Product Extensions, which will show items from a Google Shopping feed that match the keyword that triggered the ad.
Location Extensions, which will display addresses and maps with your ads where appropriate.
Phone Extensions, allowing click-to-call capability on mobile ads.

None of these are guaranteed to appear for any ad in your campaign. Different extensions have different criteria and they are still in testing phases, so Google will adjust how often they show and on what criteria. This new tab gives you the ability to view your main stats only for ads where an extension appeared.

The drop-down in the top left allows you to choose which kind of extensions you want to see, and the metrics on the right will show the metrics only for ads that included an extension.

It looks great.

But it’s not.

Unfortunately there is no ability to see conversion data, and no ability to see ads that didn’t show an extension. These are two pretty crippling omissions. The major thing I would want to do with ad extensions is to analyse whether they work! At the moment, I just don’t know. It might be that ads with an extension had much higher conversion rates, or much lower.

The other stats we don’t get to see is how many people interacted with the extension. For example with product extensions the user will see a plusbox (to expand the ad), and if they click it they’ll see one or more product images. I have no idea from this tab how many people who saw the extension actually expanded it. I don’t know how many people clicked the headline of the ad versus a product image. Similarly with sitelinks I have no idea how many people clicked one of the sitelinks versus how many clicked the headline. I’d also like to know how well each of those landing pages converted, to see if one of those would be a much better landing page.

Essentially this new tab is a step in the right direction but at the moment it’s completely useless for any of the analysis I’d actually want to use it for.

Keep going Google, and make this actually worthwhile for advertisers.

For the record, some of the features I’ve pointed out that this is missing are available (at a high level) in the reports tab.