addmustard has again got the low-down from Google on their new expanded text ads feature. Google is initially launching this in beta, for those who are whitelisted.  Currently it’s testing with two whitelisted accounts per week. To begin with, the expanded ads will show for just 20% of eligible ad group impressions alongside existing ads.

So what’s new?

• Two headlines, which each have a limited character length of 30. The second will extend alongside the first.

• The original two description lines will become one, giving advertisers an additional 10 characters to play with; now giving advertisers 80 characters in total to play with.

• The display URL field will also be removed. This will now automatically default the domain from the final URL. Two ‘path fields’ can now be added, of 15 characters each.

• This new ad format will display in any ad position across all devices.

How it’s going to look in Google Adwords:

 

What we expect the impact of this change to be:

With an increase of almost 50% in creative messaging, allowing advertisers to maximize presence on SERPS, we expect to see a positive impact on CTR and Ad Rank. On mobile devices, alongside Google’s recent update of showing three ads at the top, means even more screen space will be taken up by paid search ads.

Our SEO Expert’s thoughts:

“From an organic perspective this has similar implications to the update seen in February. A further decline in CTR of organic search results would be the first assumption as real-estate in SERPs gets tighter. However, with more features becoming readily available for SEOs to utilise, it’s not all doom and gloom.

The ever increasing and effective use of structured data markup means organic results are able to appear equally, if not more, attractive than their paid counterparts. Plus, with featured snippets making their way into around 10% of search results, Google’s permanently evolving state shows that it’s striving more than ever to serve its users search results that truly reflect their queries.” – Tom Wilson, addmustard’s SEO Senior Analyst.

How to implement; recommendations from addmustard’s SEM experts:

Firstly, to use the new feature you need to create a new set of ads, using the bulk upload template (ask your Google account manager for this). Note: Your new ads will run alongside your existing ones.

Choose high traffic ad groups from a selection of your campaigns, e.g. brand, generic and products. Within these we recommend testing key messages in your new extended headline. Here are some key topics to start with; USP’s, CTA’s, promotions/sales, price points, use of brand name to create brand awareness and countdown ad customisers.

Not sure what to do now? Get in touch with one of our SEM experts

We will soon be following up with the results of initial tests of this new feature. Watch this space!