PPC search adverts have come a long way from the stereotypical title, description and URL structure. One of the biggest additions to them has been ad extensions, which allow the advertiser to display an extra element to their search advert which work (or should work) to increase the click through rate (CTR) and conversion rate of your advert and campaign.
There are a lot of ad extensions an advertiser can use in PPC. For this reason, it would be a wise idea to look into optimising ad extensions to maximize the potential out of your PPC campaign.
 
 

Firstly, let Google Choose the Ad Extension

The great thing about ad extensions is that when you choose to manually create ad extensions, Google will automatically do many iterations of your ad extensions to determine which combination/s of ad extensions works best to maximize the performance of your advert and campaign. Think of it as automatic testing – the hard work is done for you automatically.
With this, the area that you should look to concentrate more on is in the content of the ad extension itself. For example, you can provide Google many different ad extensions to use. However, if they are unrelated to your advert and are of poor quality, then it does not really make much difference what Google thinks works best for your campaign. With this, here are some tips to help improve the content you stick into ad extensions as well as which ones to work with in your campaigns.

1. Only use the location ad extension only if you want/need people to come to you. The great thing about ad extensions is that they are free to add and, at the minimum, will increase the real estate space your advert takes up in paid search results. In general, the larger the advert is, the better it tends to perform. Therefore, although the location ad would increase the real estate space, it will also make people feel that they will have to come to you to interact with the business etc. If this is the case for you, then by all means use it. However, don’t use the location extension just to increase real estate space.
2. Quote a review when using the review extension. The review extension allows you to show a review of your website/product/etc. to add a little more credibility to your advert. The problem is that Google are quite tight as to what is shown in the review section simply because they do not want the review misleading web users with the content of it. Therefore, always paraphrase or quote from the actual review when using the review extension to stay honest and accurate.
3. Choose your links for the site link extension wisely. The site links extension is probably the most used ad extension in PPC. With this, make sure that the links you want to show in the ad extension relate directly to the advert, preferably with them branching out from the main title link of the advert.