There’s a reason ad extensions are ubiquitous on search ads — utilizing them is widely considered a best practice. They are, simply put, endorsed by everyone who knows what they’re talking about.

Generally speaking, the primary goal of ad extensions is to improve ad visibility and the customer experience, both of which subsequently improve your conversion rates.

While there are many available extensions, in this piece we’re going to focus on image extensions. So to start…

What exactly are image extensions and what do they do for you?

At their most basic, image extensions are just an image of your choosing that complements your ad. They appear next to a text ad — usually an expanded text ad or dynamic search ad — and are most often used for actual physical products.

The benefit of this is two-fold: Not only do these image extensions allow you to easily display the product you’re selling, but the larger format from the inclusion of the image takes up further real estate in the search engine results page.

Both of these traits improve your conversion rates — they better familiarize users with your product while “boxing out” competitors from being more visible to users. Further, these benefits (and the best practices that lead to them) carry as much weight on Bing as they do on Google.

Setting up image extensions

Luckily, this portion of this post gets to be pretty quick, because image extensions are hands-down the easiest extension to set up.

All you do: under ‘Ads & extensions’ select extensions, then click Google’s iconic, big blue “plus” button, select image extensions, then select campaign, and upload the pictures of your choice. That’s it!

Unlike display ads, image extensions funnily enough aren’t as picky with size and dimensions, so they’re even easier to utilize than you’d think.

You also have the choice to use Google’s automated content sweeper. This is equal parts useful and, honestly, creepy; it scans through your corresponding Facebook, Instagram, or website for pictures that could match your needs for a given ad. If you don’t have specific photos already in-mind for setting up an extension (and assuming you get over the weirdness factor), this can be a great way to save some time.

Best practices

As their simplicity would imply, the corresponding best practices are also quite simple. There’s really not too many ways you can screw image extensions up.

Obviously, one of those ways you could be by not cropping your image correctly. This goes without saying, but make sure your image clearly displays what you want displayed. Naturally, that will usually be the product being advertised.

For most products, you’ll want to display the entire product in the photo. That might seem intuitive, but there are some larger products where you’d be tempted to only display part of it; for example, if you’re advertising a truck, you still will want to include the entire truck in the image, not just a nice angle of one certain part of it.

Still, there are some things that are pretty hard to capture all of. Homes are a good example of that — in cases like these, experiment. In the case of a home, for example, try including both interior and exterior shots.

This approach also comes into play just generally; there’s not too many ways to experiment with image extensions but testing different aspect ratios and photo angles is one way. These can be quite subtle but still have a measurable effect.

Overall, image extensions are super easy and often under-utilized. Just remember when possible and applicable to display your entire product in the photo. From there — just like with all digital marketing — test often and see what gets you the best results!