Over the past several months, Google has been rolling out updates to how Pay-Per-Click (PPC) text ads are displayed.
By taking advantage of the new expanded ad changes highlighted below, businesses can clearly — and more effectively — communicate with their customers, potentially driving more traffic to their website.
Outlined below are the changes that will impact standard Google PPC text ads along with details on how the new expanded ads will help your business market products and services.
While standard text ads that were created before January 31st 2017 will still be served to leads and customers, Google will not allow users to create or edit their standard text ads after this date.
Google recommends that businesses use this opportunity to rethink their current AdWords strategies when first approaching the new ad format. They also noted that businesses should avoid adding a second headline to current text ads in order to meet the new expanded ad requirements.
With the expanded character count in the headline and description fields, it’s best practice to rewrite the entire ad(s). This will allow your team to better explain what you do or what you have that sets you apart from your competition. After all, you have more clickable space to do so. Taking advantage of that means more potential clicks to your website.
When writing headlines, you’ll also want to think about the hyphen that separates your two headlines — allowing you to connect two punchy thoughts in your ads. Think of the description a mini story for your ads. You only have seconds to grab someone’s attention, so make it work for your business.
Companies can now say more about their products or services with Google’s expanded PPC advertisements — which include not only an increased character count, but a modified look/display. The new expanded ads will contain:
Two headline fields with up to 30 characters each — Standard text ads allowed for one 25-character headline, so the new expanded ads more than double the amount of characters businesses can use in ads. Headline fields are connected on the same line via a hyphen.
[caption id="" align="alignleft" width="480"]One description field with up to 80 characters — Standard text ads allowed for two 35-character description fields. With one 80-character field, businesses have more freedom to expand one thought/call-to-action.
A display URL that will use your desired URL’s domain — Your URL and display URL do not need to match. So for example, you can send users several pages deep within your website to see a product or service area but still display the homepage URL in the ad.
Two optional path fields that are used in the ad’s display URL with up to 15 characters each — The path fields help you better identify where users will land on your website (e.g. displayURLhere/sale/fall2017). You can modify the path URLs — providing enough information about the user’s destination without confusing them with too much text. The path fields are placed after the display URL.
On the Google Search Network — Ads will appear above or below a user’s search results on Google. On Google Play, Google Shopping and Google Maps (including the Maps app), they’ll show up next to, above or below a user’s search.
On the Google Display Network — Ads will appear based on an audience that is more likely to click on those ads (e.g. those who have visited your website). You can choose where ads appear in the Display Network and even block pages that aren’t a good fit for your ads.
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