When local clients use internet search engines to research you, your services, products, and brands, they’re interested in only the most relevant and useful links to information.
One way you can “stand out” from the cookie-cutter ads that dominate your local market is to take advantage of Google’s growing collection of ad extensions to make your ads hyper-local.
Google’s ad extensions make visible many local elements of your digital presence. Your embrace of these features will positively impact your ad rank, helping you win the local ad auction to show up in a strong position (top three) more often and lower your cost per conversion.
What is Google Ad Rank?
Google’s Ad Rank is a value used to determine your online ad position, where ads are shown on a page of search results. Until recently, your ad rank was calculated using your bid amount and quality score.
What is quality score? This value represents the relevancy of your ads to the keywords entered, along with the destination page where you’re sending the click (a landing page on your website.)
What’s changed? Today, Google now incorporates the expected impact from your embedded ad extensions when computing your final ad rank. When estimating the expected impact of extensions and ad formats, Google considers such factors as relevance, click-through rates, and the prominence of the extensions or formats on the search results page.
So even if your competition has higher bids than yours, you can still win a higher position at a lower price by using highly relevant extensions along with well-researched keywords and relevant ad copy.
Your ad rank is recalculated each time your ad is eligible to appear, so your ad position can fluctuate each time depending on your competition at that moment and your efforts to optimize your ads, bids, and ad extensions.
Value of a Google Premier Partnership
When researching online marketing vendors, ask if they are a Google Premier Partner. Premier Partners can work with you one-on-one to add hand-crafted extensions to your campaign. The extensions give your business the power to provide more information to potential local shoppers and give them additional ways to respond and engage with your marketing messages.
For example, local customers can call your business number (“call extensions”), see your location on a map (“location extensions”), or choose an even more relevant web page on your site that you’re promoting (“site extensions”).
Since this latest change from Google, my data reveals that professionally crafted ad extensions are improving click-through rates and overall campaign performance because these ads are more relevant to local shoppers. Overall costs per conversion are also down by 6 to 12 percent.
If you would like to understand how to leverage this opportunity, contact a Google Premier Partner to review and enhance your ad extensions and address your unique business needs and objectives to be found online and attract more design and build projects to your integration business.
Brendan Morrissey is CEO of Netsertive (www.netsertive.com).
