Google Ads is still the most effective marketing channel to find customers who are looking for your services at that very moment. The success of Google Ads has been built on this concept; placing your business in front of an audience who are ready to buy. Due to this demand, Google Ads has become competitive for many sectors, such as letting agents and property services. Here we take a look out why it is more important than ever to make your ads stand out from the competition.
The Standard
Over the last ten years, Google Ads have launched various tactics to make your adverts stand out, in the form of Extensions. Extensions, such as Sitelink Extension, Callout Extensions, and Call Extensions are just 3 of many Extensions that you can build onto your advert. Extensions give you more ‘real estate’ in the search results, more than just the headline and description of your advert. Any serious advertisers on Google Ads will be familiar with most of the extensions, and you will find that if you are not using the three aforementioned extensions that you may be losing further ground to your competitors. What was designed to set adverts apart is now just the standard for what a successful advert should incorporate. **Extensions may not appear all of the time, but often, when they can, they will. Based on our research, Price Extensions are massively underused, yet provide an opportunity for creativity like no other extension. Enter, Google Ads Price Extension. Google initially beta-tested Price Extensions in English and $USD, but are now publicly available to all advertisers in 24 languages and currencies. Price Extensions have been around for some time, but do not tend to be used nearly as much as Sitelink or Callout Extensions. Price Extensions provide a link that can take a user directly to your product or pricing page, which helps to reduce the amount of friction between discovery and conversion.
Insurance
Generally, Insurance companies take advantage of Google Ads features, such as Price Extensions, as can be seen in the example below. The search query below is for ‘Car Insurance UK’. You can see the cost of particular insurance cover without having to click through to the ad, which is excellent as a branding exercise alone. In the example below, Moneysupermarket and CompareTheMarket both give a price before any advert has been clicked.
Creativity
Letting agent’s don’t tend to use Google Ads features as prevalently. Again, we are generalising based on our experience of working in both sectors, and this may be due to limited resources of an individual letting agent or property services company. The key, however, is in the creativity. For example, a student letting agent could use Price Extensions to advertise their lowest available price for two bedroom, three bedroom and four bedroom properties. All things being equal, this would improve click-through rate and give context to the student’s expectations of how much they can expect to pay. We can see in the example below of ‘Student Letting Agent Leeds’ that no company is using Price Extensions. Here is a fantastic opportunity to showcase the features of your properties, within the context of price.
Another example is if a letting agent has let all of it’s four and seven bedroom properties for a year, but has five and six bedroom properties available. Where better to promote this than Price Extensions? Instead of promoting every property type, simply promote ‘harder to let’ properties. If you know your properties are competitive in terms of price, there is no excuse not to use this feature.
Opportunity
It is also worth pointing out that the companies in our example are also not taking advantage of Call Extensions, which is another must-use extension if a user’s search query uses a location as part of the search.
