Make the most of expanded text ads

Paid Media / August 02, 2016

As many of you already know, Google continues to announce a suite of changes, upgrades and complete revamps to its Adwords platform. Some of these changes will make it easier for you to manage and optimize your campaigns, while others are adaptations to the growing influence of mobile and local search.

This is the first in our series unpacking the most significant new Adwords features in the last few months.

More characters, more on-screen real estate

Adwords’ Expanded Text Ads are one of the biggest changes that arrived in AdWords’ pipeline. The product team has nearly doubled the ads’ character count, placing the most emphasis on considerably longer (and more visible) ad titles. Not only will longer text ads dramatically impact the user experience on desktop and mobile search results, they will change the way we develop and optimize Adwords creative.

Google is calling this “the biggest changes to our text ads since Adwords launched fifteen years ago”. That’s something to get excited about.

So what’s the big deal?

Adwords has had a consistent character count since the beginning… the standard 25-character headline, and two 35-character descriptions. This has now increased to a whopping two 30-character headlines and one 80-character description. Additionally, advertisers can now include a more granular path in their display URL, with two 15-character slots instead of one. All of this means a bucketload more real estate for your ads. We’re getting palpitations.

The new ads will are double the size of their previous versions. Earlier this year, Google eliminated its right-hand side text ads, claiming it was making the results more mobile friendly. According to the product team, Expanded Text Ads are the next natural progression toward delivering more user-friendly mobile ad content.

What can you do to get ready?

Start writing now

Get out your spreadsheets and start rewriting your ads now. It’s going to take some time to upgrade all your AdGroups. Advertisers who are ahead of the curve will beat out those who are asleep at the wheel.

Don’t pause all your old ads

Continue running at least one top-performing version of the old, smaller ads in each AdGroup. Google hasn’t killed these ads yet. You will find that they continue getting impressions and generating traffic for a few months yet. Word is Google will be killing the standard, shorter ads on October 26.

Keep your combined headlines to 33 characters or less

Early adopters of the Expanded Text ads have noticed that some headlines are truncated. To avoid this, don’t use the maximum character limit for your two lines of headline text. Keep them to a combined maximum of 33 characters. Apparently, the truncation is more due to the number of pixels than character count. If your ad preview tool shows your entire headline, it will probably also appear that way live.

Things are going to get competitive.

First movers will be competing for those coveted top spaces. Larger ads mean fewer available ads at the top of the page… particularly on mobile. Give your campaigns more love and try to increase their quality score now. Everything you can do to get more Adwords love for your campaigns will help you once Expanded Text Ads launch. At Bloom, we’ve already been adding Expanded Text Ads in our accounts and regularly see significant lifts in CTR although we expect this to level off as most advertisers catch up.

Think about your ad content strategy

Take the time to devise a strategy to address this new format. Longer headlines mean you can put more juicy details up front; plan offers and integrate incentives into those luxurious headlines. Create iterations for A/B testing, and roll out new Adgroups that mesh with you ad creative.

Learning curve ahead
Campaign management is going to get more interesting with each new Adwords feature and upgrade. By staying ahead of the curve, running tests and sharing the results, we all learn together. Let’s collaborate to develop new tactics and best practices in response to the platform’s biggest evolution to date.