Since they were announced earlier this year, we’ve been waiting until today to get access to expanded text ads in Google AdWords. As many of you may have seen in the past couple months, Google has removed the right-hand side ads to help improve the user and search experience across a multi-platform world. With these side ads now gone, this created additional space and width for search results and four top-of-page ads.
These ad spaces are now able to use expanded text ads which allow longer ad headline — actually two headlines of 30 characters (instead of one with only 25 characters), one large description of 80 characters giving advertisers more wiggle room to create effective ad copy to highlight your products and services.
Here’s an example of how the ads will look in comparison to standard/old ads:
As you can see, the new ad (on the right) is much more predominant in the SERPs and stands out more on mobile devices. This is a big thing that Google’s been pushing for a while now — getting ads ready for the mobile first world.
Best Practices for Extended Ad Text
Here are a few best practices from the Google Inside AdWords blog:
To help you get started, we’ve published a best practices guide that walks through tips and tricks for creating and optimizing expanded text ads. Specifically:
- Create and test multiple expanded text ads for each ad group, and evaluate performance before pausing or deleting your standard text ad
- Remember to include important information about your business and other tried-and-true components from your standard text ads, like price and keyword insertion
- Focus on your headlines: they’re the most prominent part of your text ad
Google also announced that starting on October 26, 2016 advertisers will not be able to create or edit standard text ads and will only be able to create ads using the new expanded text. However, existing standard text ads will continue to serve alongside expanded text ads.
We’ve already begun making the changes to our client’s PPC ads to take full advantage of these new features — we highly encourage if you use AdWords to do the same!
