Do you have a great product that could benefit by showing a consumer an image to help drive your online sales? Want to differentiate your ads from other advertisers? You’re in luck. Google has rolled out Image Ad Extensions as a beta.
All of Google’s ad extensions to this point have been text-based. This is an exciting beta because the ability to showcase a product image alongside a descriptive ad will help advertisers increase their click-through-rates (CTR) and dominate more real estate on the search results page (SERP).
What Exactly Are They?
Image extensions are a new ad extension format offered in Google Ads. The feature is still in beta and only available to select advertisers. The image ad extension features a photo next to your text ad when your ad is triggered. This image helps to enhance your ad by visually highlighting your product or service.
Image extensions are eligible to show up exclusively on mobile devices. They are dynamic ad extensions, meaning that advertisers won’t be able to directly control the content. Rather than directly uploading an image to Google to create an image extension, Google will pull images from the ad’s landing page to display alongside text ads.
Why Implement Image Ad Extensions?
- Help improve ad quality and potentially increase quality score.
- Dominate more space on the SERP.
- Boost mobile CTR and drive more traffic to your site to potentially drive more sales.
- Attract attention to your ad.
How Do I Set Them Up?
- Go to Ads & Extensions in the left-side navigation menu.
- Choose extensions and toggle to the blue + button to add a new extension.
- Click the image extension option.
Setting up image extensions will allow Google Ads to pull images from your landing page. You will need to verify that you either own or have the legal permission to share the images on your landing page with Google for advertising purposes.
In order to be used in image ad extensions, the images on the landing page need to be in square format, or able to be cropped into a square. While the minimum size accepted is 300 x 300 pixels, the recommended size is 1200 × 1200. Image ad extension file sizes cannot exceed 5120KB, so keep that in mind when adding images to your landing pages.
It isn’t confirmed as to when Google plans to make image extensions available to all advertisers. It is best to check your account regularly to see if image extensions have become available, or contact your Google rep to get whitelisted into the beta. Image extensions are a crafty way to help give your text ads a little pizazz and, in turn, generate more sales!
