Google AdWords Bids Farewell to Rarely Used Review Extensions

If there’s one thing that can be said about Google, it’s that they are always experimenting with new features and functionality for their wide world of products and software. And what may seem like a really good idea on paper may not pan out how everyone thinks it would.

So, what is the newest addition to the graveyard of Google AdWords features?

…review extensions.

If you were a fan of this rarely used ad extension, then perhaps it’s time to fire up the Viking funeral and give it a proper goodbye. According to a recent update made to this Google support page, review extensions will be going away as of February 2018.

As seen below, a new warning at the top of the support page for review extensions lets advertisers know that in February, review extensions will be deleted along with their performance data.

Launched in 2013, review extensions were thought to be a great way to give potential customers more information about what other customers thought about a product or service. The reviews could come from both manually entered quotes or paraphrased sentences or from a third-party review aggregator such as ResellerRatings.

While great in theory, the difficult approval process made the adoption rate of review extensions very low. If you are one of the few AdWords advertisers using review extensions, one of the most important things you can do now is download historical data so it is not lost when review extensions are deleted next month.

Don’t Lose Your Data

With the extensions going away, there may be valuable data you’ll want to hold on to. Here’s a look at how to download the data from the extensions tab:

Old AdWords UI — Within the Ad Extensions tab, select View: Review extensions, and then hit the export button:

New AdWords UI — Within the new AdWords UI, the first step is choosing Ads & Extensions and then the Extensions section:

From there, choose the extension type:

Finally, choose the export button:

Our Thoughts on This Change

Overall, losing review extensions should not be a large blow to most AdWords advertisers. In theory, the extensions were a great idea and should have been very helpful to most advertisers, but the execution and approval process left a lot to be desired.

With this extension being deleted, it would not be a surprise to see Google come up with a new way to get reviews in Search ads, but as of now, there have not been any announcements regarding a new process to get reviews into ads.

Will losing review extensions impact your account in any way? Were you a huge fan of review extensions? We want to hear from you! Send us a Tweet if you are going to miss using these extensions.