Google’s Adwords service continues to be one of the best ways to reach people who want what you have to offer. Their new expanded text ads provide more flexibility — and present some challenges.
What’s an expanded text ad?
It’s a text ad, but bigger. Adwords ads up till now have looked like this: a headline, a URL, and two lines of information, plus some extensions if you use them. The expanded ads will have more space.
Instead of 25 characters for your headline, you’ll now have two headline spots with 30 characters each.
Instead of putting your information into two 35-character lines, you can have 80 characters. That sounds like a big change, but it really amounts to putting the information lines of your ad together and adding an extra word’s worth of space. Ads have sometimes shown up with the two lines put together into one in any case.
But anyone who has struggled to come up with the perfect 75-word sales pitch that will look good and make sense on two lines or on one will appreciate being able to create a well-crafted 80-character phrase with confidence that it will show up on a single line.
Your web address can also be longer. Instead of “www.local-hospital.com,” your ad could use “www.local-hospital.com/heart/ surgery/” or another phrase describing the landing page. The web address shown will give searchers more information about where they’re going, but it doesn’t have to be the URL you’re linking to.
This is all good, right?
If you achieve high quality scores, it’s completely good news for you. In fact, our call from Google described it as a reward for sites with high quality scores. If your ad is very relevant to the page it takes people to, and the page itself is high quality, you get more space.
What does this mean for people with lower quality scores? On a smartphone, they probably won’t show up at all. The expanded text ads take up more space, so people will see fewer ads within their willingness to scroll.
We’re all about the quality scores. Our process for CPC advertising involves not just crafting excellent ads, but also making sure that the landing page is going to get the best results and the best quality score. A higher quality score means you pay less for better rankings –and who doesn’t like that?
So being rewarded even more for high quality scores seems like a good thing to us. If you’ve been paying more to get placement in spite of low quality scores, it’s time to fix that.
How should you use expanded text ads?
Don’t delete all your current ads and replace with with expanded ads. Instead, create expanded ads to go along with your current ads. Just create a new ad group in your Adwords account and build some excellent new ads.
Then you can use all your data to make decisions about how to improve your results going forward.
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