Google Ads Makes Changes to Automated Extensions

A new article on Search Engine Journal reports that Google Ads just rolled out three updates to automated ad extensions. Here's what's new.



Google announced new improvements on ad extensions to advertisers geared towards easier management. Updates are coming to sitelink, callout, and structured snippet extensions. Per Google's research, ad extensions give users an additional way to engage with ads, sometimes showing a 20% lift in click-thru rate (CTR) when four sitelinks are shown in ads. Let's take a closer look at the updates.

Automated Extension Eligibility
Ginny Marvin, the official Ads Liaison for Google Ads, announced that automated extensions will be eligible to show alongside your manually added extensions. This change will roll out sometime in mid-March. The ad extensions that will be eligible to show in tandem with manual extensions include sitelink, callouts and structured snippets.

This change to automated extensions eligibility helps your ad take up more real estate on the SERP. Previously, the automated extensions above weren't eligible to show when manual extensions were created.

Manual Extension Viewability
Google already allows you to create extensions at a more granular level (account, campaign, or ad group). However, the more granular these extensions were created, these would prevent extensions created at a higher level to be ineligible to serve. With the new updates coming in March, the higher-level eligibility will change. Campaign or account-level extensions are eligible to show in your ads if they are predicted to improve performance. Predicted performance improvement comes from Google's machine learning algorithm.

If you have created hyper-specific ad extensions at the ad group level, it's a good idea to review any campaign or account-level extensions that may be eligible to show in your ads. If there are any extensions not relevant to those ad groups, you will want to reorganize in a way that makes sense for your account.