Longer Text Ads Are Coming to AdWords

What Google announced yesterday

At its Performance Summit yesterday, Google announced a change to the basic shape of the AdWords text ad, which has looked much the same for years. Google calls the new format expanded text ads.

In place of one short headline and two short description lines, each ad will have two headlines, one longer description and a display path built on your own domain.

Google also announced separate bid adjustments for each kind of device, so tablets will no longer have to bid exactly like desktop computers.

Both arrive in accounts in the coming months, and nothing changes today. The useful work between now and then is preparation, and most of it takes an afternoon.

The new ad, piece by piece

• Two headlines side by side, with up to 30 characters in each.
• One description of up to 80 characters, replacing two lines of 35.
• A display domain taken automatically from the page the ad links to.
• Two optional path fields after the domain, describing where the click lands.
• Extensions as before: sitelinks, callouts, calls and locations still attach.

The first is the one that changes the writing. Ads at the top of the results can already show their first description line beside the headline, when it ends with punctuation. The new format makes that second headline official.

Why the ads are getting longer

Since February there have been no text ads down the right of the desktop results. Every one now sits above or below the free results, across the full width of the page.

That made room for longer ads, and Google describes the new format as built for the screens of popular phones.

On a phone, longer ads at the top will push the free results further down, so the wording of those ads matters more than it did.

Separate bids for each device

Since 2013, AdWords has grouped desktops and tablets together. You could raise or lower bids for phones, but tablets always bid like computers, whatever they produced.

The announced change adds a separate adjustment for tablets, and lets you set your base bid on whichever device matters most to your business, adjusting the other two from it.

For a plumber whose customers call from a phone in a flooded basement, the base will be phones. For a supplier whose buyers order from office desks, it will be desktops.

What your device report already says

AdWords can already split any campaign's results by device: computers, tablets and phones, with clicks, cost and conversions for each.

Look at the last three months and note which device brings the calls and form enquiries, and which mostly brings clicks.

If conversions are not being counted at all, fix that first, including calls from call extensions. Without them, a device adjustment is a guess with a percentage attached.

A worked example

A water cooler delivery company with three trucks serves offices and homes across a small city and its suburbs. Its AdWords account has one campaign, set up four years ago by a former office manager.

Every ad followed the same pattern: a headline naming the service, a first line offering a free month of cooler rental, and a second line naming the area served.

The free month line ended with a full stop, so at the top of the results Google often showed it beside the headline. Most of the ads' appeal sat in that borrowed line.

After reading the announcement, the owner exported the ads to a spreadsheet and split the last quarter's results by device. Office enquiries came almost entirely from computers, while tablet clicks cost a steady amount and produced very little.

The owner then drafted one new ad for each ad group: two headlines carrying the service and the free month, a description covering bottle sizes, delivery days and the area, and a path reading office coolers.

Nothing can change in the account yet. When the format arrives, the new ads are ready to run beside the old ones, and the owner already knows which device should carry the base bid.

Rewrite rather than stretch

When the format reaches your account, it will be tempting to paste the old lines into the new fields and invent a second headline to fill the gap.

The result is an old ad with padding. Drafting new ads now, from the questions searchers have before they call, leaves time to get the wording right before anything goes live.

The path promises a page

The path fields are display text. They describe the destination rather than spelling out its real address, which makes them easy to misuse.

If the path says office coolers, the click should land on a page about office coolers, not on the home page.

And since the format is built for phones, that page has to work properly on one.

If someone else manages the account

Many small businesses pay a person or an agency to look after AdWords. This announcement is a good reason to ask what they plan to do, and when.

Useful questions: will every ad group get new ads written for the format, will the old ads keep running while the new ones are compared, and which device will carry the base bid.

A good answer mentions your customers and your device figures. An answer about best practice in general suggests the work will be a copy and paste.

The counter-case

An account that gets only a few clicks a week does not need every ad rewritten the day the format arrives. One good new ad in each busy ad group is enough to start.

A seasonal account that sits paused until autumn can wait until the format is live before writing anything.

And where every device produces enquiries at much the same rate, leaving the device bids alone is a reasonable choice.

For everyone else the advice holds: read the device report now, draft new ads in advance, and replace the old ones deliberately rather than in a rush.

Before the rollout

1. Export every active ad to a spreadsheet.
2. Split three months of results by device.
3. Make sure calls and forms count as conversions.
4. Choose the device that should carry your base bid.
5. Draft two headlines and a description per ad group.
6. Check each landing page on a phone.
7. Keep current ads running until replacements prove themselves.

Step two is the one to do this week. The device split decides your bids when the new setting arrives, and it tells you whether your ads are being read at a desk or on a phone.

How February's change made the top positions matter more is covered in no more ads down the right of Google.

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