Google has been making a number of changes this year to keep advertisers on their toes, the latest change which has just come out of BETA comes in the form of a new ad extension for mobile text ads – price extensions!
What are AdWords price extensions?
Google defines price extensions as:
“Price extensions appear below your text ad on mobile, and give you more space to tell people details about what your business offers. After interacting with your price menu on mobile, people can tap straight from the item that interests them to that item on your mobile site.”
A few key points about price extensions:
- The only ad eligible for price extensions is the top ad position.
- There is a maximum of 8 price extensions and a minimum of 3, Google recommends using 5 or more.
- Price extensions link to your mobile site, so ensure your site is optimised for mobile.
How will price extensions change the appearance of my mobile text ad?
This addition to text ads will change the visual appearance on mobiles, making ads with the price extension take up more space to showcase multiple products and services from your brand to look like this:
What is the impact of price extensions?
As price extensions have only just come out of BETA there is not a huge amount of reliable data to go on, however there are a few educated guesses we can make about how price extensions will affect the mobile search landscape.
- The increased visual differentiation of the ad, along with the extra information it provides searchers and the obvious fact that it takes up more space means that it is likely to increase click-through rate (CTR) hurray!
- The change provides advertisers with more opportunities and consumers with a potentially smoother experience and it’s likely that as a result of this, there could be an increase in competition for position 1 on mobile devices driving up the average Cost Per Click (CPC) on mobile devices.
- This could spell bad news for organic mobile searches as the increased space of text ads with price extensions pushes organic results yet further down the mobile SERPs.
Thank for reading
Follow my contributions to the blog to find out more about the latest paid media industry updates or sign up to the ThoughtShift Guest List, our monthly email, to keep up-to-date on all our blogposts, guides and events.
