Help potential customers understand your offering better with Google Ads Structured Snippet Extensions

Help potential customers understand your offering better with Google Ads Structured Snippet Extensions

Structured Snippet extensions help people know more about the nature of your business before clicking on your ad. This can be particularly helpful for the searcher that doesn’t yet know exactly what they are looking for. These extensions can appear in combination with other ad extensions such as Callouts and Sitelinks as can be seen in the examples below. Structured Snippets use predefined headings provided by Google and advertisers can then add up to ten values to follow the heading. At the time of writing this article Google provides twelve different headings, so it is likely that one of them will match with what your business offers. These headings are: brands, destinations, models, areas, styles, types and many more. Here are some examples which use the predefined heading ‘Types’:

The Appearance of Structured Snippet Extensions in Search Results

Whether a Structured Snippet appears with your ad depends on many factors. Firstly, this extension will not always appear with your advert even if you added its headers and values within Google Ads. For example, if the search query is very specific, there is less of a need for google to include your Structured Snippet extension with the ad since the searcher is already sure about what they are looking for. On the desktop search results, Google can show up to two Structured Snippets (usually only one appears) and on mobile and tablet devices it always shows only one.  They can be easily confused with Callout extensions because they also aren’t clickable, but the main difference is that Structured snippets use predefined headings provided by Google whereas Callouts leave you free to include whatever type of information you think is most relevant.

The Requirements for Structured Snippets Extensions

Structured snippet extensions have a 25 character limit and you should include at least four values with each header (a maximum of ten values can be added). Excessive or unnecessary punctuation, such as symbols and exclamation marks should not be used. You also shouldn’t use terms like ‘Free Shipping’ or ‘50% off’ in these extensions. This will lead to disapproval of your extensions and they won’t appear in search results.

Best practices when using Structured Snippets

• Your Structured Snippet can be disapproved if the values that you add do not match the headers you chose. For example, if you choose the header ‘Brands’, you must be sure to add values that are highly relevant to this category.
• Google‘s algorithms will decide which Structured Snippet is the most suitable depending on the search query. It is recommended that you add multiple sets of Structured Snippets so you increase the options that google can choose from.
• If you think a lot of mobile users will be viewing your ads, you should optimize your Structured Snippets for mobile use

Structured Snippet examples for different industries

B2B: B2B Digital Marketing agency

• Types: B2B Paid search, B2B Paid Social, B2B SEO

Ecommerce: Sports fashion retailer

• Brand: Nike, Adidas, Puma 
• Style: Leggings, Running Jackets, Trainers, Football boots

Hotels: International Hotel

• Destinations: London, Paris, New York, Tokyo

• Types: Bed and Breakfast, All inclusive, Half Board, Full Board

Healthcare: Dental surgery

• Services: Teeth Whitening, Braces, Cosmetic Bonding