Expanded Text Ads Expand Text Limits By Two-Fold
Google announced a handful of changes coming to AdWords, including Expanded Text Ads. Many are touting this as the biggest change of the bunch, namely because Google’s set to expand its ad text limits by two-fold.
That’s right, the Expanded in Expanded Text Ads means that advertisers will soon enjoy double the size of their current text ads. These newer ads are designed to optimize your presence and performance on mobile search results by offering you a bigger headline and more space for your description.
But these Expanded Text Ads aren’t just for mobile screens – they’ll pop up on all devices, and will respond automatically to the varying screen sizes.
While many in the AdWords game are calling this a huge shift, even Google folks themselves are calling it the biggest change to come to AdWords since the program launched 15 years ago.
The change is a long time coming, and one that came to fruition when the folks at Google started wondering what an ad would look like if it were designed with the mobile-first mentality. That’s why, actually, the search engine did away with the right side of ads on desktops in early 2016 – to free up more space for these Expanded Text Ads.
What Specific Changes Can You Expect With This New Expansion?
There are three areas where you can expect a change:
- Headlines will go from one 25-character headline to two 30-character headlines
- Descriptions will go from two 35-character lines to one consolidated 80-character line
- URLs will change from being manually entered (which can cause issues if you have mismatched URLs) to being automatically extracted from your final URL to ensure accuracy
What Does This Mean For Online Advertisers?
You can expect to enjoy an improved CTR, namely because with more text you get greater visibility. In fact, early reports indicate that Expanded Text Ads see an increase in CTR by as much as 20%.
What Can Advertisers Do To Prepare For This Rollout?
The best possible thing you can do is optimize your ads to increase your Quality Scores. Quality Scores are by far the most important metric in your AdWords account, but now, with this latest change, those scores are going to become even more important.
With these expanded ads, spots that fall below the third spot on mobile might become absolutely irrelevant, as they won’t even show up on the screen. Your Quality Score will boost your ranking.
The other thing you can do as you plan for this change is to optimize your ad text. Now that you know the character limits coming your way, you can begin to rewrite your ads to take advantage of the new format. Waiting until the rollout will only guarantee that you fall behind your competitors.
OperationROI can help. Not only can we create a strategy to increase your Quality Scores, but we’ll help you rewrite your ad text to make sure you make the most of the 2x more space Google is about to grant you.
Learn more by calling us at 1-888-277-5429 or by filling out our contact form.
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