What is the price extension and how does it work?
Price extensions display a list of products or services with prices below the text ad, allowing you to greatly expand your ad. By doing so, you claim your so-called real estate: "building out" your ad with additional information (extensions) so that it becomes physically large and eye-catching. Of course, everyone wants his/her ad to stand out! As you can see in the example below, the ad with price extension is completely full screen. How dominant do you want to be?
Where do I find the price extension?
You can find the price extension in the dropdown menu under the "Advertising Extensions" tab in your Google Ads account. Price extensions can be set at the account, campaign and ad group level. Moreover, you need to create a minimum of three price extensions (and a maximum of eight) before they are shown with your ad. When you create a new price extension, you're supposed to fill in a number of fields, including the language, price extension type, currency, and a pricer.
Language
The language determines the format in which the price information is displayed, for example dd/mm/yy or mm/dd/yy. Currently, only English is available as a language, but Google indicates that other languages will be added in the future.
Price extension type
Then, depending on what you offer, you can choose from nine types of price extensions, including brands, events, locations, neighborhoods, product categories, product rankings, services, service categories or service rankings.
Currency
Furthermore, you need to select your currency in the 'Currency' field. You can currently choose from six currencies: the Euro (EUR), U.S. dollar (USD), Australian dollar (AUD), Canadian dollar (CAD), British pound (GBP) and New Zealand dollar (NZD).
Pricing
In addition, you can still choose to add an optional "From" or "Up to" pricing indicator, or you can choose not to add a pricing indicator and just show prices.
Items
Items are the texts that people see in your price extension. These consist of a header and a description. Both lines can be up to 25 characters long. As mentioned earlier, you can add up to as many as 8 rows of items.
Planning
Once you have created price extensions, by default they will be eligible for display with an ad when approved according to Google's policies. However, you can choose to enter specific start and end dates if you are running a temporary promotional campaign, for example. In addition, you can possibly create an advanced schedule on which days of the week and/or times of the day the price extensions will be displayed with your ad. For example, consider a car wash that offers happy hour with reduced prices every weekday morning.
When are price extensions shown?
As I mentioned in the beginning of this blog, Google is still rolling out the price extension. Therefore, for now, price extensions are only available in English and on mobile devices. In addition, it's good to know that only the top top ad (in position 1) is eligible for price extensions. This exclusivity plus a full-screen (mobile) ad will drive up competition in position 1, which is why I expect that using the price extension could become very popular. A No. 1 ad that takes up the majority of a mobile screen stands out considerably. Such an ad, coupled with competitive pricing in the extension, will have a great chance to increase click-through-rate (CTR) significantly."
Conclusion
The price extension has the potential to become a popular extension for both web shops and service companies. Advertisers already have their position with a top ad anyway, but with the price extension they can also significantly increase the size of their text ad and show competitive prices. Although price extensions are currently only available for mobile devices, it remains to be seen until Google starts displaying them with desktop text ads as well. This is not certain, but the likelihood is very high. Especially since we will soon be able to set up separate bid extensions for desktop, tablets and smartphones as well.
