We audited an account where the ads had no images, no business name and no logo. All three fields were sitting there, all three were blank, and nobody had noticed because the ads were running perfectly well without them.
That is the shape of this problem. Nothing is broken. There is no error message and no warning. There is simply a large amount of space on the results page that the advertiser is entitled to and is not using, while the competitor above them fills all of it.
The ad text itself is the previous chapter. This one is about everything that attaches to it.
They Are Called Assets Now, and That Change Matters
If you learned this a few years ago you knew them as extensions. Google renamed them assets, and the rename was not cosmetic.
Extensions sounded like optional additions to a finished ad. Assets are components of the ad unit itself, and Google treats them that way: they are managed in their own section, they can be set at account, campaign or ad group level, and the more relevant ones you supply, the more of them can appear.
The level matters more than people expect. An asset set at account level applies everywhere, which is efficient and blunt. An asset set at campaign or ad group level can speak to the specific thing that campaign sells. Most accounts we audit have a handful of account-level assets doing generic duty across campaigns that sell very different things.
The Space Is the Point
Before the individual formats, the thing worth internalizing is why any of this matters, and it is simpler than it looks.
An ad with four sitelinks, callouts and an image occupies substantially more vertical space than an ad without them. That has three consequences, and all three are worth money.
You push everything else down. Your competitor's ad and the organic results move further from the top of the screen. On a phone, an ad unit with full assets can occupy most of the first screen on its own.
You give more reasons to click. Somebody who was not going to click your headline might click a sitelink to your pricing page.
You can answer more than one intent. The headline addresses the search. Sitelinks address the four things that person might actually want next.
That is why the audit note we write most often is not "your assets are wrong." It is that they are absent, and the ad is a third of the size it could be at no additional cost.
Sitelinks Are Navigation, Not Decoration
Sitelinks are extra links beneath your ad, each with its own destination.
The mechanics worth knowing: sitelink text is limited to 25 characters, you can hold up to 20 at a given level, and you should have at least four active for them to serve properly. Fewer than four and you are frequently showing none.
The mistake we find is not usually an empty sitelink section. It is four sitelinks that all go to more or less the same place, or that repeat what the headline already said. That is decoration. Sitelinks work when each one goes somewhere genuinely different and answers a different question: pricing, the specific service, proof, and how to get in touch.
Each sitelink can also carry two description lines, and most accounts leave them blank. Filled, they make the sitelink itself larger and more persuasive. Blank, you get a bare link occupying the smallest version of the space.
Callouts, Snippets, and the Difference Between Them
These two get confused constantly, and they do different jobs.
Callouts are short phrases that are not clickable. Free estimates. Family owned since 1994. Same-day service. They are reassurance, not navigation, and their job is to answer the small objections that sit between reading your ad and clicking it. You need at least two before they show, and a handful can appear at once.
Structured snippets are a header plus a list. Services: repairs, installation, maintenance. Brands: and then your brands. They are how you communicate range, which is exactly the thing a 30-character headline cannot do. On desktop up to two headers can appear; on phones you get one, so put your strongest header first.
Neither of these is where you repeat your headline. If your callout says the same thing as headline two, you have used the space and gained nothing.
Images, Business Name and Logo
These are the three we find missing most often, and they are the ones that change how the ad looks rather than what it says.
Image assets put a visual next to your text ad on mobile. Google recommends supplying at least three so it has something to choose from. For anything with a physical product, a premises or a visible result, this is the single most noticeable asset you can add, and it is the one nobody has done.
There is a second reason images matter that has nothing to do with looks. A picture of a commercial unit, a job site or a clinical device tells the wrong searcher this is not for them before they click, which is the filtering job the previous chapter argued ad copy should be doing. An image does it faster, because nobody has to read it.
Business name and logo attach your identity to the ad unit. The logo renders small and circular, which means a detailed logo with fine text becomes an unreadable smudge, and a simple mark works. The business name has to match your domain or your verified legal name, so this one occasionally requires the advertiser verification step rather than just typing something in.
The account we opened this chapter with was missing all three. Not misconfigured. Missing. Which is a five-minute fix producing a visibly bigger, more credible ad unit, and it had sat undone for as long as the account had been running.
Call Assets Come With a Tracking Trap
Call assets deserve their own section, because they are the one asset type that is also a measurement decision.
Adding a call asset puts your phone number on the ad, and a call placed from it can be recorded as a conversion without any work on your website. That is genuinely useful, and it is the fastest route to conversion data for a business whose leads arrive by phone.
But there are two separate ways calls get counted, and confusing them causes real trouble.
Calls from the ad unit are handled by the call asset itself. Turn it on and the mechanism is built in.
Calls from your website need a snippet on the site, which swaps your displayed phone number for a tracking number when somebody arrives from an ad. Different mechanism, different setup.
Two audit findings from the same problem. On one account, the call asset was correctly configured but recording no recent conversions at all, which is not a shrug, it is a signal that something is broken between the ad and the record. On another, calls were being placed from a phone number sitting inside a website pop-up, and a number in a pop-up is a place the swap can quietly fail to reach, so those calls were happening and not being counted.
If your call asset shows zero over a period when the phone rang, do not accept it. That is the same class of problem as a tag that never fires, and it makes every other number in the account wrong.
There is one more habit worth building here. Assets are not a launch task you complete once. A seasonal callout, a promotion asset during a sale, a sitelink pointing at the thing you actually want to sell this quarter: all of these decay quietly, and an account left alone for a year is usually advertising last year's priorities in its assets while the ad copy has moved on.
Filling Them In Is Not the Same as Showing Them
One expectation to set before you go and do the work.
Assets are eligible to show, not guaranteed to. Whether they appear depends on ad rank, the device, the query, available space and Google's judgment about relevance. You will fill in four sitelinks and see two.
That is not a reason to skip the work. It is the reason for the work. Because appearance is probabilistic, the way to get more of them showing more often is to supply more of them and make them genuinely relevant. An empty field has a zero percent chance. A filled one has a chance every time.
It also connects back to position. Assets show more readily in higher positions, so an account with poor top impression share sees fewer of its assets, which compounds the disadvantage rather than offsetting it.
The Twenty Minute Version
- Open the assets section and look at what is actually there rather than what you assume is there.
- Sitelinks: at least four, each going somewhere different, each with both description lines filled.
- Callouts: at least two, saying things your headlines do not. Objection handling, not repetition.
- Structured snippets: pick a header that describes range, and put the strongest one first for mobile.
- Images: at least three. This is the most visible gap in most accounts.
- Business name and logo. Check they exist and that the logo survives being rendered small and round.
- Call asset: confirm it is on, then confirm it is recording. A zero across a month when the phone rang is a broken measurement, not a quiet month.
- Check the level. Account-level assets are generic by nature. Campaigns selling different things deserve their own.
None of this requires budget, a new campaign or a rebuild. It is filling in fields that already exist inside a Google Ads account, and it is the closest thing to free space the platform offers.
We check the assets section on every audit, and it is consistently the fastest improvement available. Hand it over and we will build the set out properly. Or open your assets section tonight and count the sitelinks. If the answer is fewer than four, or none at all, you have found twenty minutes of work worth more than most of the changes people spend a month debating.
