The new expanded text ad format provides advertisers with up to 140 characters to promote their products and services, a significant increase on the previous 95 character limit.
In addition to the increased character limit, the new advertisements have:
- Two headline fields (up to 30 characters each)
- A single, expanded description field (up to 80 characters)
- A Display URL that uses your final URL’s domain
- Two optional ”Path” fields, used in the ad’s Display URL (up to 15 characters each)
The image below shows the difference between the new expanded text ads and the standard text ad.
The Benefits: Expanded Text Ads
The new generation of text ad appeals to both advertisers and users (particularly mobile). Users will be provided with more information before they commit to the click, while advertisers will benefit from having greater control over their messaging.
Google’s early findings show that the new text ad format has the potential to increase click through rates by as much as 25 percent.
While our initial experiments with the new advertisement format have not generated such drastic results, the increased character count has helped us to improve advertisement relevance, a major factor that determines quality score. The increased quality score may help to reduce the cost of each click.
Upgrade to Expanded Text Ads
Currently, both standard text ads and expanded text ads are available to all Adwords users. Users may have noticed that expanded text ads are the new default setting for advertisement creation. Users can change back to the standard ad format by clicking the Switch back to standard text ad link above the “Final URL” field.
Standard text ad creation will be supported until 26th October 2016. Following this date, new advertisements will need to be created with the new expanded text ad format.
This update marks the second major change to Google’s search results following the elimination of right hand side ads from the desktop devices in February, 2016.
