Expanded Text Ads: Google’s Latest Update

In case you haven’t updated your Google Ads recently, you may want to look again. Recently, Google rolled out the new and improved Expanded Text Ads. For those of you familiar with Text Ads in Google Ads, you’ll know that for some time they’ve had the option of 2 Headlines, and a single Description. This Ad as a whole is then displayed in search results to potential customers when your keywords are triggered by a search term.

How Expanded Text Ads appear normally.

Now, thanks to Google, we can add even more content to the same Ad, at the same cost as they normally are, by simply editing the existing Ads.

Bigger, better ads

Google’s new Expanded Text Ads are a feature that has been rolled out to Ads accounts for a few weeks now, so you may have seen some extra options already. These new Ads have an additional Headline and Description, both of which are optional fields, so all of your current Ads will still function the same, and the same format can be used (unlike the older, now deprecated, single Headline Ads).

Expanded Text Ads in the the new format, with additional information.

They’ll still display in the same format when appearing in search results, with 2 Headlines and 1 Description. However, based on screen space available, which can vary from device to device, the additional Headline and Description may also appear as well, providing extra details about your Ad, at the same cost as a normal Text Ad. Because of this, there really is no downside to filling out both optional fields, though we would logically suggest filling the first Description field with the more valuable information, as it will always be displayed regardless.

Extra features in this update

Additionally, some other tweaks have been added to this new Ad format. The Description fields have also been extended to 90 characters, allowing you to squeeze in some extra information to potential customers. Even if it’s just an extra word or two, every little counts. On top of this, Text Ads are now automatically optimised for Mobile, and when creating a new Ad, both a Desktop and Mobile preview will be available, so you can check out how it will look before it’s live.

This gives you a significantly greater amount of freedom when creating your Ads, and we at Aillum do recommend that you pop into your Google Ads and have a look to see what extra valuable information you can display when your Ad appears in a customer’s search results.