Google has recently unveiled what it has deemed to be the biggest change to PPC text adverts in 15 years: expanded text adverts. In short form, Google is now increasing the maximum character limit for the title (as well as slightly increasing the length of the description) in a bid (if you’ll pardon the pun) to improve PPC advertising for advertisers and web users alike. With this huge change, here are some of the key things you need to know about the expanded text ads that will slowly creep into dominating Adwords and PPC advertising.

#1 What Has Actually Changed?

Before we go any further, let us understand what Google are changing about their adverts to make them ‘expanded’:

• Before, the title was limited to a 25 character headline. It will now consist of two 30 character lines.
• Before, the description consisted of two 35 character lines. Now, it will one 80 character long line.
• The URL would be entered by the advertiser with any mismatches between the URL being shown in the advert causing the advert to be disapproved by the Adwords team. Now, the URL is automatically generated based on the URL of your landing page to make sure the URL is more representative of the landing page web users will land onto.

From this, it is clear that the biggest change is with the title of the advert although both the other two areas that construct a search text advert have been altered too.
 
 

#2 What are the Numbers?

In essence:

• The title is expanding from 25 characters to 60 – that is an increase of 140%
• The description is expanding from 70 characters to 80 – that is an increase of 14%
• The URL will not have any change to the maximum character length.

#3 Why are Google Doing this?

Every change Google makes to its PPC advertising program will have the main objective to help make adverts perform better. We have to remember that over 95% of all of Google’s profit comes from PPC advertising. Therefore, if they can squeeze out more performance from Adwords, they will literally be adding billions more revenue per year (all for a little optimisation).
There have been early reports that expanded text adverts have developed CTR increases of 10-20% – if this is really the case, it will be a complete no brainer for advertisers to develop campaigns to accommodate this new and exciting text structure.
 
 

#4 When will it be Released?

There is no word from Google (yet) about when the expanded text advert will be released. All we know for sure is that Google are going to release it soon to the public so if you are very interested in giving this new advert a go in your campaign, make sure you stay up to date with all channels regarding Google and PPC advertising so you get the notification of it’s release as soon as it is released!