Google Ad Price Extensions are Now Live on Acquire - This Shows How We Approach Our Product

Another day, another drop! That’s how it feels lately as our Product Team’s productivity is running super high. Today’s release is a very big deal for those who know the business of driving leads and sales from paid Google SEM. Drum roll….“Price Extension” automation is here! 

Yes - I’m aware that this level of excitement for a feature release called “Price Extensions” is the marketing equivalent of geeking out. So let me zoom out so that at least those of you who want to get savvier on Google Advertising for car dealers (like half my LinkedIn) can do so.

Extensions, as many of you know, are dynamic add-ons to specific Google Ads that Google deploys to the ad as it sees fit. These have been released consistently over the past decade and constitute a very important part of the Google Ad framework.

Price Extensions are one of several extension types that AutoLeadStar fully supports and automates for our dealer’s digital advertising / SEM. The others that we currently support include: 

• Location extensions
• Callout extensions
• Call extensions
• Sitelink extensions
• Structured snippet extensions
• Price extensions

Before I share a quick overview about each of these I want to share a bit of behind-the-scenes color about this new release of Price Extensions.

A month ago a customer asked us about Price Extensions for Acquire. This extension has been around for a while now in a few versions, but took a major step forward in July and was coming into use by marketing agencies that serve the automotive industry. We didn’t currently have it live. That said, it seemed like a good idea for us. 

Since I like to keep an eye on inbound customer questions, I thought I’d have a chat with our product team to see what was cooking. I checked in with our Product Director, Ido, and he shared with me that the extension was indeed coming out soon, and that it was currently undergoing testing and research prior to launch.

We ended up having a fascinating discussion about how we assess and release new features and integrations that Google and Facebook offer.

The first point that I thought interesting is that, being a software platform, we think in an entirely different manner than a marketing agency. Our mission is to build one-to-one customer journeys for car buyers, giving dealers a way to speak individually to shoppers across the whole marketing and sales funnel. We do this by leveraging a fully automated technology platform that gives dealers unprecedented speed (active 24/7, always scanning for changes and updates), scale (active on all their services and cars, fully focusing on the totality of the dealers’ business) and specificity (getting as close to we can to exactly what the shopper wants - not essentially billboards on the internet, but rather, a crafted offer, based on data and best-in-class predictions). What we call internally “3-S.”

To accomplish this ambitious vision at a platform level, our tech has to be very good, very smart, very automated, and very synced with platforms we have to either get or send data to (for example, CRM). Any new feature we add has to fit the model we have for extracting, transferring, loading, and learning from data and performance information. Before we let anything new into that ecosystem, even something that comes from Google and Facebook, we put it through a rigorous vetting process to make sure it can live up to our 3-S framework for car dealers specifically. 

Second, during the vetting process, we want to understand that the new feature truly gives our clients a lift in performance and that the lift is measured as close to the sale as possible, i.e. that it helps drive an outperforming cost per quality lead. We’ve found in the past that some new releases do a great job of improving vanity metrics, but not metrics that move the needle. From our perspective, that’s a poor use of marketing spend, and so we keep it off the platform. If it does move the needle on real business metrics then we push it through and leverage our tech to do a really good job at deploying it.

The challenge this creates for us sometimes is that dealers ask us for such things that we don’t offer, or that we’re currently testing. For example, an agency pitches a dealer about a certain type of extension being a breakthrough - and the dealer then pushes us to deliver it, fast. Most dealers and vendors can sympathize with this conundrum. In our philosophy, we believe that the greater good for our clients is served by putting features through their paces prior to release, and maximizing every aspect of it once live.

Long / short is to say that you can rest assured that when new features come out of FB and Google, we’re deeply researching, testing, and assessing whether it should go into AutoLeadStar Acquire feature set. If I was a dealer client I’d see it like this: you have a whole research and development team working on your behalf, making sure that you’re set up with the best technology that simply works for you, rather than making you work for it.

Ok, now that I’ve shared that background, here’s a quick overview of the extensions we currently offer in Acquire. (This might also be helpful to you dealers looking to learn more about ad extensions more broadly.)

AutoLeadStar currently supports these extensions in Acquire fully automated, and at no extra cost:

• Location extensions
• Callout extensions
• Call extensions
• Sitelink extensions
• Structured snippet extensions
• Price extensions

Location extensions are as they sound - they encourage people to find your local retail presence. Here’s an example:

Callout extensions let you surface important text or messages that might lead your ad to be more specific and higher converting:

Call extensions put the relevant phone number directly into the ad, leading to some impressive lift in inbound calls (but also a lot of garbage calls, so good tracking is essential). 

Sitelink extensions take shoppers to specific pages on your site, for example a VDP or a model SRP page.

Another common Google Ads extension is the Structured Snippet extension. Here you can essentially feed specific information about your services and inventory that goes beyond the ad, such as special deals. They are built by providing a header (i.e. Destinations) and then a list of values (i.e. Cleveland, Columbus).

Finally, and newly released to our product set, are price extensions! Price extensions pull in specific inventory and prices directly to the ad. This can increase specificity and raise quality clicks.

There you go. I’ve said my extensive piece on extensions :-). 

(If you’ve gotten this far let me know and I’ll give you a shout out!)

Thanks, everyone, for letting us build Price Extensions into Acquire for you! 

-Aharon