Every Google Ads Asset (Extensions): How to Setup & Optimize [Step-by-Step Tutorial]

Ad assets can significantly increase your click through rate. But there's a ton of them to go through in the account. Which one should you have in your account? How do you actually create them? In this video I'm going to go step by step through each ad asset, what I recommend and how to actually create them inside of your account. Also, Google snuck in a setting where they're automatically creating ad assets on your behalf. You may not even be aware of that. They hide the setting to even turn this off. So I'm going to show you later on in this video where to actually go find this setting and turn this off if you want. So let's go ahead and dive in. What are ad assets or formerly known as ad extensions, they are nothing more than dynamic snippets of information that get added to your ad. So for example, Amazon.com's ad here has no ad assets. Filter by.com has many ad assets. Well, you can notice a clear difference in how big and how much real estate space filter by dot com's ad takes versus Amazon.com so if you're not using ad assets and then you implement ad assets, you're normally going to see an increase in click through rate. And it's exactly why you're seeing in Filterbuy.com's ad. They have a much greater chance of getting the click versus an ad that does not have ad assets like Amazon.com now later on in the video I'm going to share how to get your ad assets to show more often and why there will be times you won't see ad assets. This by the way, is on our blog. On our website we have a full breakdown of ad assets. I will have that in the description if you want to go take a look at that. But. But for now let's go ahead and dive into a real account. I'm going to share with you step by step each ad asset that we recommend building and then how to build them and what you should be including in each one of those ad assets. So let's go ahead and get into an account now. So I'm inside of a real account. At the ad asset level, your interface might look a bit different. Google is rolling out interface changes. All of the information and settings are going to be the same. However, they just might look different. I got to this asset level by going to Ads and Assets and then simply clicking Assets in the newer interface, which maybe you're already on. It's simply just going to have an assets area in the navigation so they actually make it easier to get to. Just a heads up. If you're looking at my screen and then you're looking at your account and you're saying, wait, it looks a bit different. It's just you have a different interface, but again, all of the, all the information, all the settings, they're all going to be the same. They just might look a bit different. Now, you see a lot of ad assets here. I'm looking at essentially the account level right now. That's very important. You can add assets to the account level, you can add assets to the campaign level, and you can add ad assets to the ad group level. Campaign will override account. Ad group will override campaign and account. So if you have account level assets and then you build a campaign and then you build specific ad assets to that campaign, it will override any of the account level ad assets. That is a very nice feature. I always recommend creating universal account level ad assets just in case you. If you're building out campaigns and you forget to add campaign level ad assets, at least you know there's some ad assets still showing. But when you're building campaigns, usually they're going to be themed to some sort of service or product or brand. You want to build specific targeted ad assets for each of those, and so then do those at the campaign or ad group level. That way you don't have to worry about those ad assets then showing for maybe brands that you have that you don't want. So, for example, if you have a Nike campaign and an Adidas campaign, well, you don't want Adidas specific ad assets showing in your Nike campaign. Well, you don't have to worry about that if you set them at the campaign or ad group levels within your Nike and Adidas campaigns. All right, so let's go ahead and start diving into building some ad assets foreign. Let's start with sitelink extensions. If you remember, in the beginning of the video, I shared an example of Amazon.com's ad that had no ad assets and Filterbuy.com that had lots of ad assets. Well, site link extensions. If your ad shows with those sitelink extensions, it takes up a lot of space, just like that filterbuy.com ad. Most of that is coming from the sitelink extensions. It really expands it. So Google can share up to four. So you're going to want to build at least four sitelink ad assets. However, at times they'll show zero or they may show two. Your chances are greater the higher your ad position. So if you're ad position number One, you're, you're going to have a greater chance of showing all four of those sitelink extensions. You're gonna. Sorry, you're gonna hear me say extensions quite often. I've been in the game too long so I don't say assets all the time. Still I still sometimes say extensions. With that said, your sitelink assets can show if you're number one, position number one and with all of the information. So when building these sitelinks you have to have a sitelink text. So for, for this example, this is a furniture company. I'm just going to do sectional sofas as the text. Right now you have description line 1 and 2, it's optional, you don't actually have to add those but it's highly recommended if you're going to be building these. Absolutely. Put those descriptions in. I'll share with you. Why? So we're just going to. Let's do this. Pet and kid friendly sectional sofas made for action. Okay, so you'll see that's not showing yet. Well, your ad assets for sitelinks can show with no descriptions and it just, just shows the site link text. So sectional sofas or it can actually show all of them. Uh, it's not going to do it in this preview. So let me share with you one where it does. So we're going to go to use existing. I've already built site links out for this company. Boom. You see how it's sharing the descriptions here. That's absolutely what you want and that's how you get the greatest amount of real estate taken. Your descriptions do not get too clickbaity. Do not get over salesy. Generally just describe what the site link is. Again, if they click that they are going to a URL of some sort. So if you hit create new you have to give it a final URL. So make sure whatever site link you are adding, explain what that is. If you have features and benefits, obviously bake that into it. But don't get over salesy with your site links. Generally you want. If someone's intrigued by built in storage, you know, simply, you'll love this feature. A great place to hide things that's going to resonate with someone who is looking for built in storage sofas or sectionals. And that's going to drive a click and it's going to take them to a page where we're explaining usually the features and benefits. In this case it is the features and benefits of the sectional sofa and one of it is the built in storage feature. So don't get over salesy. Don't, don't try to get clickbaity, but you've got two description lines there. Make sure you add them. So call out extensions, Call out extensions. You can have up to four call outs that show. Again, Google may not show them or maybe they only show a few, but make sure you add at least four. You can add up to 20 and then Google's algorithm will just mix up the different call outs until it finds, you know, which ones usually perform the best. I Normally don't add 20. I've never had an account where it was needed. But I always, always make sure I at least add four because you want to always have as much information with your ad assets show as possible. So if Google can Show up to 4, I'm going to give it 4. Now call outs is what do you want to call out about, you know, the brand, product or service that you're advertising for. This furniture company, home reserve, you know, here usually the top sort of feature. So we have pet friendly and kid friendly washable fabric that's usually huge made in the usa. So there would be four that I would add for at least home reserves ad and it shows. So here's an example. It usually is going to show your call outs and sometimes Google actually like highlight them in blue. They change that all the time though too. But, but they'll usually show your call outs at the end of your text ad. So usually it's below the description lines that you have in your text ad and then they'll bake in the call outs at the end of that. Kind of like you see here. Okay, structured snippet assets. These can get pretty crazy. There's so many different options. Now structured snippets will be baked into in normally at the end of your description text in your ad similar to how call outs are. And you have a lot of different options to choose from. So you have amenities, brands, courses, degree programs, destinations, featured hotels, insurance models, neighborhoods. So if you're a plumber, you can put the neighborhoods that you cover, service, catalog, show styles and types. So you can get real crazy with these. You can get very specific, you know, if you're at an ad group level or even a campaign level for, for this example I have built more of a generic one because it's at the account level. So for home reserve furniture company types. So I have sectionals, sofas, couches, love seats, chairs and ottomans. And this is what it can look like again it just kind of bakes it in at the description. But depending on what your brand or product or service you're advertising. You can get pretty in the weeds with structured snippets. Make sure to add at least three. I believe you can add up to 25. Google's never going to show 25. I forget the most they show it could be could be more than three. But normally I don't see more than three. So usually I try to get my top three in value, 1, 2 and 3. If you add more than three, it's going to be like call outs. They'll just do different combinations and test in your ads. And then Google's algorithm will usually find sometimes the top performers and start leaning towards showing those more often. So usually I always just try. If I'm only going to add three, just bake in the top three there. But if you have more, go ahead and add it and Google will randomize the combinations of them and over time the algorithm will start showing those that perform the best more often for better performance. For your account, right, we have call extensions. These are perfect if you are running ads on mobile and calls are important to you. Now, believe it or not, for home reserve, we actually don't want to serve up call extensions for various reasons. So we actually don't have them added in the account. But I'm going to show you, you know, what that would look like. I'm going to use obviously a fake number. So we'll do sort of. There we go. Now I'm sure all of you have seen, you know, if you're searching on your phone, you get this call icon and you can click it and it calls directly to that company. And then you know, if you're on desktop, it actually will have a lot of times the number shown in the ad itself and call that out if someone wants to call. Now normally if calls are important, we recommend using call tracking a lot of times especially, especially for our lead generation clients. So we're using something like call rail or call tracking metrics. But you know, standard Google call tracking is just fine as well. You do have to. So you see this little warning. You're not collecting call details because call reporting is off. You actually, you just click that. You can turn call reporting on. I'm going to show you that real quick. So turn call reporting on. It's going to hit save. Yes. Boom. So now that is set up. This will actually create a calls from ads conversion automatically in your conversion settings so you don't have to worry about setting any sort of conversion tracking up separately. For this, Google automatically creates that and then, you know, let's say you run ads 24, 7 but your customer service department only works, you know, maybe 9 to 5 and Monday through Friday you can actually set then those times. So ads may show at the campaign level for your ad schedule and they may show longer. But you don't want that call extension showing and people calling it. You know, I see this a lot in audits. I'm like turn the, turn the call off. Because you have people clicking because if someone clicks that call button and then they don't get a response, chances are they're not coming back. And then clicking your ad to go to your website, usually they're, they're bouncing or there's a greater chance of them bouncing and potentially going elsewhere. So if you don't have customer support 24 7, most people don't then go ahead only set the hours that someone would be available to actually take that call. Location assets. These are very important. If you are especially like a local service business and you're only targeting local geo targeted area like the city or maybe neighborhoods that you cover and home reserve. We do have a location asset set up. This is done through usually your Google My business profile. So you link that to your Google Ads account. I have a Google support page about location assets and then how to set these up. It's not fully done just inside the Google Ads account. Usually there's further information that Google needs in order to link this again usually with your Google My business profile. But it can get a bit complicated, especially for franchises that might have, you know, hundreds of stores. So I'm going to put this link in the description below. If you are, you know, someone who does have multiple locations and maybe you don't have a Google business profile, they give you a breakdown of how to create location assets and different scenarios for like chains and then also single store locations as well. This is what it's going to look like. I can't technically show you in home reserves accounts. I'm going to give you a real example. I just looked up, you know, Mercedes dealerships and boom right here. So I am in Fort Wayne, Indiana. You know, even though we are a remote company here at grow my ads, we actually do have a physical office in Fort Wayne, Indiana and so I am nearby. It knows that based off of my search and then obviously my IP address and so here is the address right here. So sorry Mercedes Fort Wayne. I'm going to click that probably cost them a little money and it takes me to. This is from their Google My business profile. It's showing me where they are on the map now. And then there's obviously all of their information here, website, phone number, everything else. So very important if you are a local business and you do have a physical location, make sure to have those location assets added. Okay. Image assets, I love these. These are fairly new within like the last maybe year or two. But they, you know, they turned text ads and gave it a little bit of creative flair to it by being able to add the images. And so when these first came out, you know, we immediately added it across all of our clients. And in most cases competitors are usually slower to add things like image extensions when they first came out. And it was really cool cause we got a decent boost and click through rate for that short period of time. Now most people are using them, but I love them and so you know, you'll actually see at times I'm sure you've Google searched and you see a text ad with an image to it, it just, it's great. So if you're not using it, make sure you do images. You know, there's some quality standards there. Like you can't have text overlays and you know they can't be blurry or like really bad images. So make sure you do have good images. All you do is click this images. Now we, we have a lot of assets of images because we've tested so much within this Google Ad account. However you can really, you can just put your website in. So let's say you don't have a lot of creative assets right now. You can have Google Crawl your website and if there are images on there that it's able to pull, it will put them right here and then you can click and choose. So let's just see. I'm going to just use Home Reserve's website real quick to see, see it pulled images right there. They also allow you to, to scan Instagram, your Instagram page, your Facebook page, LinkedIn or Twitter if you have any of that. And if you don't have image assets at all, you can actually use stock images if you want. So you know, here's a bunch of stock images in regards to furniture. So I will obviously not use that because we have our own image assets. But you know, if you found some stock images that matched at least what you're advertising, you can go ahead and use stock images. So just because you don't have a lot of maybe image assets doesn't mean you can't utilize image assets to your ads. Go ahead and just use some Stock photography if needed. Price assets. These will show in these boxes below your ads similar to what this example is showing. So it, if Google decides to show your price assets, they really do make your ad pop. Now make sure your prices are competitive. I've seen accounts where they're running these price assets and then I'm like, you guys, your guys price is higher than your competitors. Get rid of those products that you're advertising on that you're like immediately disqualifying yourself. You have, you know, brands, events, locations, neighborhoods, which is interesting. So here's different types. But this would be, you know, I guess for real estate. So this gets in the weeds too. Similar to structured snippets. There's product tiers, so it could be, you know, if you, if you're selling, you know, custom sizes like it's showing for these sort of metals, service categories, service tiers, services, etc. So there's a lot you can do here. There's price qualifiers you can have. So if, if you don't want to share like specific, specific pricing, it can be from or up to or even an average lots you can do with these price assets. Highly recommend adding them only if your prices are actually good. Again if, if you have products or brands or whatever it may be and your, your prices are high, don't do it. And then also make sure you update your pricing. We've done lots of audits where I look at their price assets and then you click them and then you go to the product page that it sends you to when you build these and the prices has changed. So if your product pricing is changing quite often, a lot of times I would not use specific pricing. Try to use more of these price qualifiers if possible. If you do add it and your price is changing a lot, then you have to make sure you're going back and then changing that within your price assets. Most people don't. And so then you have this mismatch between what your ad is showing for a price and what the product page is showing. Google does not seem to catch that a lot of times and it doesn't automatically disapprove them. And so in many audits have just found mismatched prices from what they put in their price assets versus what they're actually now showing on the product page of their website. So make sure you check that for home reserve. You know, we've got different furniture, so sectionals, modulars, etc. We have chairs and ottomans. So we just went ahead and we added those and we used the price Tier from. So you can see sort of some of these here from. We didn't want to put specific pricing because there are lots of different options. So we used in that case the price qualifier which I like using a lot of times a lot of options there to choose from. And again they really make your ad pop. If Google decides to show those price assets, Motion assets, I love these. If you are running any promos, man, do they, you know, make your ad really pop and you definitely notice click through rate increases. So Google gives you lots of different occasions, you know, back to school, Black Friday, Boxing Day, carnival, Chinese New Year, et cetera. There's a whole list. I'm not going to go through all of them. You know, you don't necessarily have to use the occasion if, if it doesn't make sense for you. So you can just choose none. But in a lot of times, you know, people are running maybe Valentine's Day sales, right. So I actually will show the headline bolded, which I really like. There's the desktop version of it as well. And so I'm not. Well, we'll just keep Valentine's Day for this case. So you can add that. You don't need to. You can do percent discounts, monetary discounts up to so up 2% discounts et cetera. You can add the items and then for this case we're going to do percent discount 10% and then we'll do sectional sofas. Home reserve does not discount. So this is just for the example and then final URL. Here's the thing, if you try gaming Google, they will find out. So if you try putting in fake stuff, sales or promotions, the algorithm is going to catch it. And so you need to have this information somewhere on your website for Google to crawl and catch. A lot of times, you know, websites are using promos so promo codes are nice. We'll just do sofa as the code. So we'll even show it there. A lot of times promo codes get approved first if the promo codes are live on the website. But you don't have to, right. So you just if you're running a 10%, you know, site wide promotion and if you go to the website and it's on there, Google will know that and usually approve it. The other nice piece, you can have the start date and end date show. So if you have like an end date on this, you know, let's do just February 15th. This is going to show the end date. I really like that because then that gives you the searcher sort of that timepiece where, oh, I've got only this promotion for so long. And so usually that that helps, especially if there is an actual end date then you can schedule. So let's say this thing does end on February 15th, you know you're not going to be around. So we'll have a start date here of the 21st of January and it's going to end February 15th. Let's say you forget or you don't want to potentially forget. You never know, right, what's going to happen the morning you wake up. And you do not want these promos then running if you don't set an end date right, if. Especially if it's over. So again, in many audits we have found promotion assets running that should not have been running. A lot of times Google will eventually disapprove it, but there are times they don't and it's running and then it's just a terrible user experience. So this is nice because you can schedule it so you can say, hey, I want to start, start on this date and then I need it to end on this date. And then you can actually even set different times. So if you know the sale for whatever reasons ending at 5pm Eastern Time on February 15, you can actually set it to that exact time. Now be careful, make sure it's on your account time zone. There are times people forget that their account time zone might be set to Pacific or Mountain or something different. So you have to be careful about that. But Google thankfully adds your account time zone setting information right here at the bottom. But another mistake that I see made quite a bit, promotions, though, beautiful if you're running them at all. These promotion ad assets are an absolute necessary to add to your search ads. Then have a mobile app, you can actually add that as an ad asset and is perfect for mobile searchers. They can download the app directly from your ad then. So you would Choose Android or iOS, you would search for your app and it will actually show it then below and you can click then and download the app directly. Very nice if you have a mobile app that you actually want to advertise to get further downloads. I do not have an example of that. We don't have any clients that are running mobile app downloads right now. And so I don't have like a real example, especially for Home Reserve, which sells furniture. But nice feature if mobile apps are important to you. All right, there's business name and business logo. These are fairly new in the last, I don't know, year or two, just add your business name. It's as simple as that. And then business logo, you can go ahead and add that. And they Google has stuck started adding the logo next to your ad. A lot of times Google can pull that. So sometimes they'll automatically do it. But you know we have a logo. So hit save and boom, there it is. It'll show next next to your business name and then also your website inside of your text ad. Fairly simple to add automated ad assets. Google has taken it on themselves to create ad assets for you. How generous of Google. So you have to be extremely cautious. You might not even know this is going on in your account. Google does an excellent job of creating really bad assets. Now sometimes they actually do a good job but you want to monitor it or control it. In our case we are every day involved with our client accounts. So we want control of what assets are being shown within our ads and what messaging is being shown. So for the most part we have these turned off. I'm going to show you how to turn those off. But just be aware, this does exist. You would see in the asset level if Google did have any automated assets created, at least they do share with you ones that they've created. Again that would be at the asset level. In this account I have 0 being shown because we have them turned off. But if, if you want to check your account, just go to the asset level. You'll be able to find ones that Google actually created. Now how do you get there? Well, Google does a really good job of hiding this. So you see this three button more to the far right side here. We're going to click that. Now it's going to show account level automated assets. This is going to take me to some metrics here. Now we don't have a lot because we're not really running any automated assets other than seller ratings. What which I'll talk about in a second. Now go to more little three button dot thing here. Again you got to go one more layer to advanced settings. Now you are at the settings to turn this off. So again Google does not make that easy. So you'll see I have site links off, call outs off, structured snippets off. Seller ratings is on. I didn't even talk about seller ratings in this video. That's because you can't actually create seller ratings inside of the asset level. There was no option for that. Right. So seller ratings I have on. If you're collecting seller reviews, you're using either Google reviews or third party review system like trustpilot. Google can pull that information and it Puts stars next to your ad. So we have this one turned on. Longer headlines. I actually like this. Again, this is not a setting that you can create at the asset level. It doesn't exist. However, in the deep settings that we're at, you can have longer ad headlines turned on. I like it. Just be cautious of, you know, potentially seeing ads out there that they, they may add text to or whatever. But longer ad headlines takes up more real estate. So I just like having that on. I don't always have it on, especially for a brand that's very, very strict on their brand copy. But for this case, we, we have it on apps, locations. You can have that on. We do in this case. Images. I hate this one. They will, Google will pull images from your website if you don't have images and dynamically add them to some of your campaigns or account or ad groups. Man, I've seen some really bad images get pulled. I've seen incorrect products being shown for different brands. So for example, an Adidas shoe showing for a Nike ad. I've, I've seen it happen. So. So I usually turn dynamic images off and then, you know, business name and logo, you can have those on or off as well. If you want to test, fine. If you want to lean in a little bit into Google's automation, go ahead. Just be consciously aware if these are on. And in most cases, I'm just recommending turning it off. You now know how to create literally every ad asset there is. So create your own control, your own copy and narrative for your ads. And here's the full control of settings to be able to do that. All right, what if you go and build all these ad assets out and then one day you're searching, you see one of your ads and you're like, oh man, there's no assets to my ad. Why is that? Well, you have no control of it. So Google decides whether or not they're going to show assets or not. And they could show all of your assets or they could show maybe just call out and structured snippets, or maybe they show two site links and just a call extension. You have absolutely no control whether or not Google decides to show ad assets and then how many they decide to show. However, if your ad positioning is higher. So if you're like number one, your chances are greater for Google to show more ad assets. So the ad that I showed earlier, filterbuy.com their ad has lots of assets being shown. Here you can see their site links have even the two descriptions being shown. That is due to the fact that they are number one when we took this screenshot. Usually you're not going to find an ad that has all these assets showing on anything lower than position one. Not saying it doesn't exist, I'm sure it does. It's just rare to run into. It doesn't make sense for Google to give someone who's lower more real estate space, right? So they're going to give the position number one a little more love with those ad assets because they are usually bidding higher and have the higher ad rank to be at position number one. So if you're trying to get you know, the chance of your ad assets showing lots of them being at the top position is going to increase your chances of that happening. But just remember, ultimately you have no control and it's up to Google that wraps it up for ad assets. I hope you got great value from this video. If you're running ads, whether it's for yourself, you're a freelancer, you own an agency or maybe you work for an agency, it doesn't matter. We have a free Google Ads group. The description will have the link to that group below. I would love for you to come join again. It's totally free. I have a free performance max course in the group, hours of video content and a complete framework on performance max campaigns in a notion doc as well. If performance max campaigns are important to you, doesn't matter. You can ask any questions you want on Google Ads. I am actively involved responding trying to provide as much value as possible. Would love for you to come join. Would love to see you inside. If not, no worries. I will hopefully see you on the next video.