Ad Extensions: How to Apply Them More Efficiently

If you follow our blog or already have some experience with Google Ads, you probably know the ad assets (the former extensions) for the Search Network (sitelinks, callouts, calls, etc.) and how important they are to ad relevance.

Before we move on, a quick aside: in 2022 Google Ads renamed extensions to assets. In this article we use the current name. As you will see below, the change was not just cosmetic.

But are these assets structured in the best possible way in your ads?

That is what we will look at in this article, where we show you how to use your account's structural levels to create more relevant, on-target ads for your audience.

The hierarchy of a Google Ads account

First, it is worth remembering that a Google Ads account has a hierarchical structure made up of:

The ad account itself, then campaigns, ad groups and finally the ads.

An account can hold several campaigns, which hold ad groups, which in turn contain ads.

How each of these components is organized depends on the company's business model and strategy.

Your account can be organized around the categories of products/services you offer, the geographic area you serve, the audience you want to reach, etc.

A good strategy is to mirror your website's structure in your ad account.

How to Apply Ad Assets More Efficiently

Here we reach the main point of our article: how best to apply your ad assets according to your account's structural levels.

When it comes to assets, keep in mind that they can be applied at 3 levels: Account, Campaigns or Ad Groups.

And why does that matter? Because it lets you show assets that are more specific and better suited to each level, greatly increasing relevance for the user.

Take, for example, a computer equipment e-commerce store divided into several sections: desktops, laptops, memory, software, peripherals, etc.

You could, for example, structure your sitelinks in a more general way, each representing a section of your site, showing the same sitelinks in every ad.

That way, a user searching for “graphics cards” would see sitelinks for desktops, laptops, peripherals, etc. See:

The example above is decent, but not ideal.

Remember that a Google search expresses a specific desire. The user in our example is most likely interested specifically in “graphics cards”.

So the most relevant assets would be the ones bringing more information about graphics cards.

If the user searched for monitors, it would make sense to show monitor sitelinks, and so on.

See the following example:

Notice how the ad becomes far more relevant than the one in the previous example.

In this context, you could add sitelinks about the store as a whole at the Account level.

For a “Hardware” Campaign, we would have sitelinks specific to those items (graphics cards, motherboards, processors, hard drives, etc.).

Finally, in a “graphics cards” Ad Group, the matching sitelinks.

And how does the system decide what to show when there are assets at more than one level? Back in the extension days, the more specific levels took precedence: sitelinks attached to a campaign blocked the ones at the account level.

That has changed. Today Google can show sitelinks from any level of the same branch together (account > campaign > ad group), choosing the combination with the best predicted performance.

In practice, this makes organizing by level even more important: any asset in the branch can end up being shown, so all of them need to make sense for that ad.

Broadening the Horizons

It is worth noting that, although our approach used sitelinks as the example, this procedure is just as advisable for the other assets (callouts, structured snippets, prices, etc.).

That way, every user gets ads much richer in information for their search.

Before publishing your changes, it is worth checking how the ad will look on the results page: the Google Ads ad preview tool, a free tool here on our site, builds that preview instantly.

We hope this article helps you make your ads ever more relevant, connecting better-qualified customers to your products or services.