Savvy advertisers know that highlighting perks like “free shipping” and “price matching” can strengthen their offer and improve the performance of their ads. But it can be difficult to feature these benefits when space in the ad description is limited. To make it easier to reveal important features in your ads, AdWords offers callout extensions : additional text that displays with your ads to highlight key information about what you have to offer. In this post, I'll show you how you can use callout extension to strengthen your ads in Google AdWords.

Set Yourself Apart from the Competition

Callouts let you craft a more compelling offer by including additional snippets of copy with your Search ads. It’s a simple and effective way to draw attention to unique features that may be missing from the competition. For example, if your ad includes a callout that specifies “free shipping,” customers can easily recognize your value over your competitors. By including distinctive features in callouts, customers will have a better understanding of what sets you apart before they decide to click through to your landing page.

Leverage Callouts on Mobile

Callouts offer the flexibility needed for cross-device marketing and can be tailored specifically for mobile devices. If there are features relevant to mobile users, you can create mobile-optimized callouts that will show on mobile devices exclusively. For example, a car insurance broker can create a callout for a “quick mobile quote” to encourage mobile users to click through. Alternatively, if there are features that are only applicable to desktop users, you can disable those specific callouts from displaying on mobile. With this level of versatility, you’ll want to create callouts for every device.

Combine Ad Extensions for the Greatest Impact

Callouts also work well when combined with other ad extensions . For example, if you have a sitelink for “Christmas Gifts,” you can give last-minute shoppers peace of mind by creating a callout for “free overnight shipping.” Or, if you’ve set up a location extension to display your restaurant’s address, you can reach a broader audience by creating a callout for “free delivery.” As with other ad extensions, callouts make your ads more useful and improve your Ad Rank . This enhancement also improves your ad position , which can place your ad above the competition in search results.

Create and Optimize Callouts for the Highest ROI

Getting started with callouts is easy. You can create, manage and report on them from the Ad extensions tab. Like sitelinks, you can either create general callouts that span across your entire account, or create tailored and highly relevant callouts on the campaign or ad group level. For example, an advertiser can create callouts on the account level for site-wide features like “free shipping,” while category-specific features like “30% off sunglasses” can be created in the “sunglasses” ad group. Because reporting is available for individual callouts, it’s easy to find opportunities for optimization so you can ensure that every callout has the highest ROI.

Takeaway

Callouts are incredibly flexible, and creative marketers like you and I can consider them a blank canvas. For help getting started with callouts, read The New Must-Have AdWords Extension: Callouts . See how you can leverage them to improve your ads by creating your first callout today!

Have any tips or tricks to leveraging AdWords the callout extension? Share them in the comments below.