Google Adwords has been adding features left, right and centre – and at the end of April, they added another ‘ad extension’ option, this time to help you promote your apps.

The idea behind it is, that perhaps your customers, or potential customers, might not be aware that your business has an app. It also offers your business another way of differentiating itself from its competitors, because the extra link and information helps it stand out.

The choice will be to either click through to your website through the title (as per usual), or click directly through to the app on the ad extension. The app link will be to the app page on the app store (Google Play or Apple App store).

This new extension is just that – an extension. If you want to promote ONLY your app, and not your actual business or store, then you might prefer to use the Click to Download  ad type, which uses the app store URL in it’s display URL, prompting people to click to download your app.

To enable a mobile app extension, just add it like any other extension – note though that your app must be on sale in either the Google Play or Apple App stores.

Google Adwords has been making a lot of changes recently – from allowing misspellings and plurals in phrase and exact match, to providing more information about Quality Score.

They also have a new feature called ‘labels’, which you can see in a number of places:

1. On each of the campaign/adgroups/keywords/ads tab, it is a dropdown above the statics table

And

2. On the Dimensions tab it is a new view option.

These labels can be used at the campaign, adgroup, keywords or ads level, to allow you to compare segments within your account.

How could you use this? We’ll give you an example at each of these levels;

Campaign Level Labels

Say you had a number of campaigns in your account for two countries (which often happens here in Australia). So, for example, we might have the following campaigns;

• New Zealand Search
• Australian Search
• New Zealand Remarketing
• Australian Remarketing
• Australian Content network
• Australian demographic
• Australian Dynamic Search Ads

If I added a label to each of these campaigns – either NZ or Aus – then I could go into the dimensions tab and quickly and easily compare the performance of the two countries as a whole. Note that it will also show a line “Everything else” in case you have campaigns which don’t fit either of those labels.

Adgroup Level Labels

Lets say you have campaigns for Australia, New Zealand and China, and each of these campaigns has adgroups for hats/shoes/scarves.

By labeling the adgroups as either hats/shoes/scarves, I can easily compare the performance of these products as a whole across all campaigns, on the dimensions tab.

You can also compare them by country by showing the ‘campaigns’ column on the dimensions tab – so that you can see, for example, how hats sell in NZ vs Australia.

Keyword Level Labels

Lets say, you want to compare the conversion rates of your keywords which have action words in them like ‘buy’ vs those without. Or those with ‘buy’ vs those with ‘review’. You can label all those keywords appropriately, and then compare them in the dimensions tab.

Ad Level Labels

You can use ad level labels to test the various versions of your ads. For example, you might want to compare the performance of ads with certain display URLs, or those using Dynamic Keyword Insertion. Seeing the overall performance of your ads by different aspects could help you to build better ads in the future.