Google have revealed that they will begin rolling out a new advertiser report within their online service, Adwords, which will make it simple for digital marketers to assess how effectively their automated ad extensions are performing.

The announcement was made by the American multinational on their Google+ account, and confirmed that the new ‘automated extensions’ facility would be replacing the retiring “annotations” feature as the tool in which ad managers can identify the consumer and selling ratings of their products. Google highlighted that their reporting and Help Centre documentation would reflect this change, with the new automated extensions report expected to be rolled out over the next two weeks.

The news will be warmly received by SEOs and webmasters, who have long lobbied Google to incorporate a feature on their Adword’s programme which enhances their capabilities for setting up analytic reporting on the performance of their online itinerary.

At present, most AdWord extensions are automatic; they display or don’t display on the basis of certain criteria. Because webmasters don’t actually switch them on or manually set them up, their scope for reporting has been severely limited. In particular, making insights into the effectiveness of an ad when these automated extensions displayed in their ads compared to when they did not has been a frequently highlighted area of difficulty by webmasters. Google have argued that the new reporting feature will seek to address and remedy this issue by providing ad managers with the logistics to assess “how ads with automated extensions such as consumer ratings and selling ratings show up”.

You will be able to find the new report under the view drop-down section insight the Ad extensions tab. The feature is set to be rolled out over the next couple of weeks, after which you will automatically be able to see the consumer & selling ratings of your ads when they display.

“Some ad extensions, like consumer ratings and seller ratings , don’t require setup and will automatically appear with your ads if your ad meets certain criteria”, the Google’s post identified.

“Over the coming weeks, we’re rolling out a new report in AdWords that shows you how your ads perform when they appear with automated extensions. To view the report, select “Automated extensions” from the View drop-down in the Ad extensions tab . Keep in mind Google already optimises your ads to show the most relevant ad, generally showing your highest performing and most useful combination of extensions and formats among those eligible. So there’s no need to compare and manually optimise for performance across your automated extensions”.