After quite a long beta period, Google has finally released review extensions to all Adwords accounts. For those who are not to familiar with this new extension, it will give advertisers the opportunity to highlight a specific third party review of their business directly below the ad itself.
Contrary to having your reviews only on review sites this extension will enable your business to stand out from your Adwords competition. It will look something like this:
As you can see, many companies have already activated these review extensions and have recorded excellent results once these extensions have been added.
Statistically speaking, we have noticed an average CTR increase of 10% across many different industries. Of course, each industry has its own particularities, however every client has experienced an increase in CTR.
The interesting aspect of this extension is that you can either submit an exact quote with the Source URL as your review, or you can simply paraphrase the review. Yes that’s right, Google will allow you to paraphrase your review.
The major guidelines for these extensions are that the reviewer needs to approve the ad extension & the review needs to clearly be stated on the landing page. It is currently only offered in english, and will be offered in french shortly.
A great strategy to use for this extension is to ask the website that hosts your reviews to create a separate landing page that only contains reviews for your business. In addition to this, brand blocking the landing page is extremely important, as you would not want a competitor’s display ad displaying directly next to your review!
As far as how Google will verify these reviews, the specifics are still unclear. The actual Google advertising policy team will undoubtedly oversee the approval process, as most reviews would be too difficult for an automated system to process. (Especially for the paraphrasing submissions) Therefore, allow for some delays.
Even though this extension works very well for a large corporation, we believe that this extension will be most useful for small to medium sized businesses that have a lot of PPC competition.
An example of an industry that will surely benefit the most from this extension would be the hospitality industry. With so many competitors this extension not only adds to your PPC real estate but it also provides increased consumer confidence.
How to setup Review Extensions
The way to set up your new Review Extensions is relatively straightforward. It is very similar to any other extension set-up. Using the Ad Extensions tab under “View” select Review Extensions and then simply follow the instructions. The character limit on Review Extensions is 67, and that includes the name of the publication.
Google recommends setting one Review Extension at the campaign level for greater flexibility and exposure. You can submit more than one review, but only the first one to be approved will run. Also, campaign level extensions are given a higher priority than ad group level extensions, so they are reviewed more quickly.
In conclusion, we strongly suggest adding this extension to your PPC accounts. Adding this extension to your campaigns will help improve your overall PPC performance and will allow your account to differentiate itself from your competition.
Let us know about your experiences with this new extension. This can be ways you’ve learned from your mistakes, or how ways you’ve found success – either way, feel free to share your experiences it in the comments section below.
This article was originally written by Matthew Gangnier.
