Most marketers are familiar with ad extensions, but if you’re not, ad extensions are a great way to improve the overall performance of your Search ad. Ad extensions allow you to provide more information about your business and typically increase engagement with your ad. According to Google, adding four sitelink extensions to your ad can increase your ad’s click-through rate by an average of 20%. Ad extensions also enlarge your Search ad, meaning your ad will take up more space on the search engine results page. With this knowledge in mind, Google has made improvements to sitelink, callout and structured snippet extensions to make them easier to manage.

Automated extensions are extensions that are dynamically created by Google to show with your ad when you opt in. In the past, automated extensions weren’t eligible to show with manually added extensions. For example, if you added two manual extensions, only those two extensions would show, even if you previously opted in to the use of automated extensions. This improvement from Google changes that. Now, Google will show two automated extensions along with those two manually added extensions.

With this update, reporting will now be viewable at an individual level. You will be able to easily identify which extensions were manually created, and which extensions were automatically created. You can also pause or remove any automatically created extension you may not want or need. This improvement is helpful, as you can view which extensions are performing best and make optimizations as needed.

Another improvement Google has made to ad extensions is allowing higher-level extensions to show alongside lower-level extensions. Previously, if you had extensions set up at the account level or campaign level but added extensions only to the ad group level, only the ad group-level extensions would show. If extensions set up at a higher level are projected to improve your ad’s performance, they will now show alongside your lower-level extensions. With this improvement, Google adds that it is important to make sure your higher-level extensions will work with your lower-level extensions to ensure all of the extensions that show with your ad are relevant.

Ad extension improvements are set to start in mid-March and aim to make advertisers’ lives easier when it comes to ad extensions. Automation has the ability to improve the performance of your ads, but it’s always important to review any automated extensions to make sure they align with the message of your ad. Individual reporting should make the reviewing process easier and allow you to make better optimizations. All in all, these improvements are exciting and will make managing your ad extensions easier.