Google recently introduced new search ad for smartphone screens called Expanded Text ads (ETAs). John Stuchfield, Head of Paid Search at Found, looks at how the move give advertisers far greater control of their bids.
Last week Google announced the rollout of Expanded Text Ads which left us all seeing immediate and very noticeable changes across all our devices. The new-style longer ads with double headlines are now appearing alongside standard text ads and are already creating more stand out, higher CTRs and more traffic, for these listings.
But in true Google style, this was only the first seismic shift of the week. As announced in May at the Google Performance Summit, the availability of device bidding and responsive display ads is also now beginning to roll out, and these new additions alone are set to further transform the paid search landscape.
But what’s all the fuss about?
All of these latest changes reflect and are driven by the increasing importance of mobile. At the recent summit for AdWords and Google Analytics customers, Google gave us their first official update since 2012 on the total number of searches handled annually. From an already mightily impressive 1.2 trillion searches, the figure has jumped to over 2 trillion – and over half of these searches take place on mobile.
With their new double headline, Expanded Text Ads (ETAs) offer advertisers up to 2 x 30 characters in the headline, along with a description of up to 80 characters. This is almost 50% more ad space to best showcase client’s products and services, and gives advertisers more real estate on the SERPs. According to Google, this improvement was introduced in order to give mobile users more hard information, and early test feedback suggests an average click-through boost of around 20 per cent – all good news for advertisers, who could see a consequential rise in traffic and ROI.
As for the old school, at least for now, standard ads will continue to appear alongside ETAs, with October 26 set as the cut-off for when single-header text ads will no longer be accepted from advertisers.
However, the second important announcement is equally about giving advertisers even greater control over AdWords campaigns. It will hand them the very valuable power to use different base bid adjustments for targeting ads on mobile, desktop and tablet devices.
This is excellent news for advertisers as previously, under the Enhanced Campaigns regime introduced in 2013, desktop and tablet bids had been rather awkwardly tethered, and advertisers lacked the freedom to focus campaigns solely on mobile. While this won’t necessarily precipitate a return to the old approach of siloed, device specific campaigns, it will give advertisers far greater control of their bids again. This will become even more important with the development of Smart Bidding, and the ability to seamlessly incorporate Target CPA by device.
In response to further advertiser demand, a wider bid range has also now been introduced, giving them even greater scope of up to +900%. However, these key changes aren’t available to everyone right away and Google are instead staggering the rollout over the next few months.
But that’s not the end of this string of improvements and changes. Google have also begun to roll out Responsive Display Ads which will serve across the Google Display Network (GDN) on all devices – though, once again, most importantly on mobile.
The ads will auto-generate, resize and adjust in style, and will be able to serve not just on the classic GDN but also on Google’s native ad inventory. All advertisers need to supply is dual 25-character and 90-character headlines, a description up to 90 characters, an image and a landing page URL. It’s over to Google to do the rest. It will be interesting to see how this impacts display ad competition with Facebook as a result, and other display and native platforms.
With other digital retailers undoubtedly lining up to swiftly follow Rakuten, eBay and Fandango’s lead in enjoying the benefits of greater speed and lower data pull via Google’s other new introduction, its Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) format, the mobile search arena has never looked so inviting for advertisers…
John Stuchfield
Head of Paid Search
Found