What This Means for You
Google’s new Expanded Text Ads are designed to give you more advertising bang for your buck by maximizing your brand’s presence and performance on mobile searches—and whatever is good for “mobile first” is, by extension, good for desktop and tablet searches. In the biggest change to PPC text ads since AdWords launched 15 years ago, Google has officially rolled out Expanded Text Ads featuring bigger headlines and longer descriptions that will wrap automatically based on screen size.
Let’s take a closer look at the changes and what they mean to your paid search program.
- What prompted this big change? Several months ago, Google considered what an AdWords ad would look like if AdWords was created in today’s mobile-first world, where more than half of the trillions of searches conducted yearly on Google are through a mobile device. After eliminating right-side ads on the search results pages of desktop devices, Google is now using that space to improve the user experience for an ever-growing “mobile-first society.”
- How big is “big”? Consider HUGE! Boasting a 47% increase in character count, Google Text Ads now have 140 characters to stand out. Where you previously had 25-35-35 characters for the headline and description, you now have 30-30-80 characters for two complementary headlines and one consolidated, longer description line, respectively. This results in a copy increase of 140% for headlines and 14% for descriptions.
- What’s changing with display URLs? Until now, display URLs had to be entered manually, with any typo or mismatches resulting in the disapproval of your ad. Thanks to this recent update, AdWords will automatically extract the domain from the final URL to ensure accuracy. Advertisers can then add up to two paths to enhance the display URL, using up to 15 characters.
- Will this improve CTR (Click-Through Rate)? In a word: yes. CTR increases 12% just by adding ad or call extensions to mobile text ads. Following this logic, more text means greater visibility. Early reports indicate that expanded text ads are seeing CTR increases of as much as 20%.
- Does this affect how you advertise to different devices? The days of creating device-specific ads are a thing of the past—the new Expanded Text Ads usher in the age of cross-device advertising. Considering 90% of searchers use multiple screens sequentially to accomplish a task over time, and 98% move between devices the same day, this change will serve your targets the most consistent ad experience possible. AW takes these statistics and the new AdWords capabilities into account when crafting content and call-to-actions that are relevant and achievable on all devices.
- What’s the next step? This new format will apply to all new PPC ads as of October 26. Any existing standard text ads will continue running, but editing these ads or creating new ones won’t be possible. To take advantage of this exciting development, AW’s Digital Team has already begun optimizing clients’ paid search programs by creating a new, robust PPC ad build-outs.
Give Your Brand 45 More Opportunities to Shine
If you haven’t been using AdWords to advertise your business, now is a great time to start. Contact us to find out how a small investment in PPC ads can mean big returns for your company.
