It’s Official.
Google have updated their AdWords blog to announce that they have changed the headline format of their AdWords ads.
Now, if your first description line of your ad is a complete sentence and your ad is showing amongst the top 3 ads, your first description line will appear in your headline!
This is yet another in a spate of recent ad format tweaks by Google who, in our opinion, have a long term goal of blurring the lines between organic and paid search results. These changes however, now mean that many AdWords accounts will require rapid and strategic optimisation in order to take advantage of the new format.
So, without further adieu, below we have provided you with the low down on how to get your head around this new ad improvement from our good friends at Google.
How do you know if your ads will be affected?
The best way to estimate which of your ads will change over to this new appearance is to analyse your ad positions and the first two lines of text for any of your top position ads.
Ads where the first line of descriptive text ends with a punctuation point and are in top 3 positions will need to be optimised.
It will also become good practice to ensure that your headline and first two lines of ad text have an element of fluency between them. For example, if your ad headline is repeated in your first line of descriptive text, optimisation will be necessary.
Unfortunately, if you are unhappy with the change there is no option to prevent this happening to your ads as the change is applicable to all Google domains globally. However, if you dislike the appearance or are unhappy with the performance of your new elongated headlines, you can change your description fields to communicate one whole sentence across two lines in order to revert your ads to the original format.
But why would you want to?
We believe Google is trying to improve the look of paid advertisements by having them look increasingly similar to organic links. This will, most likely, result in higher click through rates for ads shown with the longer headline and, in turn, generate more ad revenue for Google! A win-win situation. It also gives the consumer a greater amount of information as they enter your site, leading to higher qualified traffic to each website or landing page being advertised.
All of these rapid fire ad format changes do beg the question though…
If Google are happy to keep tinkering with their tried and true ad format (which have been partly responsible for most of their annual revenues to date)
Then what in the world will be next!?
