Google Ads Extensions and Assets: The Complete Guide to Boosting Ad Performance

Why Ad Extensions Are Non-Negotiable

Ad extensions (now called "assets" in the Google Ads interface) expand your ads with additional information, making them larger, more useful, and more clickable. Google automatically shows extensions when they're predicted to improve performance — and they almost always do.

Ads with extensions earn higher CTRs, improve Quality Score (via Expected CTR), and provide more paths for users to reach the right part of your website. Not using extensions is leaving money on the table. Every account our Google Ads team takes over gets a full extension audit in the first week.

Sitelink Extensions

Add up to 8 additional links below your main ad, each pointing to a different page. These dramatically increase the visual footprint of your ad on mobile and desktop.

Best practices:

• Use 4–8 sitelinks per campaign/ad group
• Make each sitelink genuinely useful and distinct — not slight variations of the same page
• Add 2-line descriptions to sitelinks when possible (up to 35 chars each) for extra detail
• Align sitelinks to the campaign's intent (pricing page sitelink in a bottom-funnel campaign)

Example sitelinks for an analytics agency: "See Our Pricing," "View Case Studies," "GA4 Setup Service," "Book a Free Audit"

Callout Extensions

Short snippets (25 chars max) that highlight key selling points. These appear as additional text below your ad description.

Good callouts: "Google-Certified Team," "Fast 3-Day Setup," "Guaranteed Results," "No Lock-In Contracts," "Free Initial Audit"

Add 8–10 callouts at the account level, then add campaign-specific ones where relevant. Google automatically rotates the best-performing combinations.

Structured Snippet Extensions

Highlight categories of services, products, or features with a predefined header type. Headers include: Services, Products, Brands, Destinations, Courses, Features, etc.

Example: Services: "GTM Setup, GA4 Integration, Conversion Tracking, Server-Side Tracking, Data Layer Setup"

Call Extensions

Add your phone number directly to the ad, allowing mobile users to call you with one tap. Critical for service businesses where phone calls are a primary lead channel.

Set call reporting to track calls as conversions in Google Ads — this feeds bidding algorithms with phone lead data. Track calls with a Google forwarding number (available in most regions) to get duration data and filter out short "wrong number" calls.

Lead Form Extensions

Allow users to submit a contact form directly in the search results without visiting your website. Particularly effective on mobile where form completion rates on landing pages are lower.

While convenient for users, lead form extensions can reduce landing page engagement data. Consider testing them against landing page conversion rates for your specific audience.

Image Extensions

Add images alongside your text ads. Particularly effective for visual products or services where imagery helps differentiation. Only available to qualifying accounts and shown in certain placements.

Price Extensions

Show a table of your services/products with prices, headers, and descriptions. Ideal for businesses with clear pricing tiers. Pre-qualifies users before clicking — those who see pricing and still click are more likely to convert.

Promotion Extensions

Highlight specific offers or promotions with dedicated extension fields including occasion, monetary discount or percent off, and promo code. Time-limited offers benefit significantly from this extension type.

Extensions and Conversion Tracking

Many extensions (especially call and lead form) require their own conversion tracking setup. Call conversions need to be configured in Google Ads to track call duration and fire conversion events. Lead form submissions need to be passed to your CRM.

Our Google Ads team always sets up extension-specific conversion tracking alongside core conversion events. If you use GTM, call conversion tracking can be managed through Google Ads auto-tagging without extra GTM tags.

Need an extension audit and setup? Contact us and we'll identify which extensions you're missing and set them up correctly.