In late February I wrote a post about the Google removing ads from the right-hand side of search results, and the new strategy of the famous search engine that is going to affect both the UX of the search engine and the Google Adwords features.
As of last week, the way Ads are shown in SEM of Google is rather more informative! The expanded text ads feature is operational and despite some issues that arose (especially in Desktop view) are shown the way to us, the advertisers.
In the first FREE seminar of digital marketing that took place in Athens, Greece, last week, I had the privilege to talk about expanded ads to the ones who attended. It was not an in-depth presentation of that feature, but a rather informative one. In this post I will try to present this in a much more analytical way.
What are expanded text ads?
Most advertisers first reaction to the removal of right-hand side ads was “oh! no! How can I get my client to the first page of SEM?”. Well my reply to that is simply with a more quality ads. How can you do that? Well, the more characters you get the better the message will be.
So, the expanded text ads are twice bigger than the standard ones. The whole logic behind that is to boost and support the mobile search results with a bigger headline and an extra long description.
What do you mean bigger and extra long?
47% more space for you to communicate more! 47% more space to be creative and effective. Is way too much, if you consider the previous status quo!
So, we are able to say more in the Headline of our Ad, but be careful, you should keep the combined character count of the two headlines limited to a total of 33 characters to avoid having the second headline truncated. Like the one below:
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How long are both ways going to be operational?
Based on Adwords support documents, as of 26th of October 2016, “AdWords will no longer support the creation or editing of standard text ads.” Any new text ads created after that date will need to be formed as expanded text ads.
However, the existing standard text ads will continue to work and used, alongside expanded text ads, after the aforementioned date.
The 5 bullet-points that will help you out!
- Keep using your standard ad texts! Yes, there is no need to risk your hard-working quality score. Keep using the standard text and create new expanded ad text to support and eventually replace the standard ones
- Be creative! Don’t just add a headline, but use it in order to say something more and something relevant that will increase your quality score.
- Use the Path fields wisely! The essence of Adwords did not change you know! So, include top keywords in the Path fields and make your ad more relevant.
- Ad extensions! If you already use them, alter them a little bit if they repeat what you’ve already said in the ad text. If you don’t use any… what is wrong with you? 😉
- Call me! Yes! If you find that post useful why don’t we have a hang-out and discuss your advertising needs!
