PPCAdWords Callouts – How Are They Performing to Date?

AdWords Callouts – How Are They Performing to Date?

Lots of clients have adopted Google callouts as part of their copy strategy, but how are they performing so far?

On September 3, Google announced callouts as a new ad copy arsenal weapon. Being a big fan of ad extensions since the day they came out, I was really excited about this. The purpose of callouts is to add an additional line of ad copy text to show specific and detailed information about your business, including product and service offerings.

And it appears that lots of clients have adopted them as part of their copy strategy.

But how are they performing so far?

Granted, this is a very new offering, and there hasn’t been a lot of time to get data. And being a non-clickable search format, this is a very new concept. Not like the other extensions.

However, I wanted to be an early adaptor. Always the pioneer, I decided to set up a controlled test with one of my client’s campaigns.

It was a small campaign that doesn’t spend a large amount of money per month, and has a small number of adgroups and keywords. I added callouts on 9/10, and made no other changes to the campaign for a month to see if the callout change alone would have any impact. We built a graph to compare the average cost per clicks (CPCs) and average position.

adwords-callouts-1

Our overall position slightly improved, but our CPCs showed some elevation. With another client, we saw an increase in CPCs as well.

When we specific pulled the data on the three callouts, the numbers were rather interesting:

adwords-callouts-2

It shows the first two callouts to be virtually identical in all of the metrics.

Since callouts are not a clickable link, why are the callouts broken out individual, if they are showing almost the same data?

In looking at another campaign that we set up callouts for (which were set up at the ad group level as opposed to the previous example which was at the campaign level), we saw the same issue with the impressions and clicks not showing any diversity, but we also saw no clicks for the extension:

adwords-callouts-4

In discussing this with Google directly, we found out we were not the only ones who had noticed this! Callouts are of course not clickable – so when you see click report with callouts, you are seeing clicks based on a person clicks on the ad itself, or another extensions. Callouts are also not served up every time with an ad, which can result in variances, and the number of callouts displayed can also vary. Since you can have a total of two to four callouts per ad, each time your ad is served, the number of callouts can be different, or the callout may not be served at all.

In the data above, the “other” clicks are coming from other things in the ad that are clickable, as the callout is not. All that can be shown for the callout is the impression data only. Yet this can be a bit confusing when you look at the reports for the first time.

For mobile, Google will typically display three callouts, and for desktop and tablet, two to four.

Back to our question as to why each extension is showing similar data…

Per Google, this will change over time. Since callouts are so new, the data gathering is still in process. Once more data is obtained we should start seeing which callout is more of the “clear winner.”

Have you implemented callouts in your AdWords campaigns, and what are you seeing? Would love to get your feedback!

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