What are Expanded Text Ads?
Until now, you had the option of creating a text ad that consisted of a 25-character header, two description lines of 35 characters each, and a visible URL that was also limited to a maximum of 35 characters. For example, such a text ad might look like this:
Standard text ad
Expanded text ads are, as the name implies, expanded ads. This will change:
- There is about a third more text space and a whopping 47% more pixel space available in your ad with 40 extra characters!
- The title consists of two lines of up to 30 characters each (instead of one line of 25 characters). The descriptive line that follows can consist of up to 80 characters. So this means one long line instead of two shorter descriptive lines of both up to 35 characters.
- With ETAs, you also enter a visible URL, but two URL paths of up to 15 characters each can be used for this purpose.
- The domain name preceding the URL paths is automatically generated from the URL of the final destination page.
- The green ad tag (which was yellow a while back) is now fully written out instead of abbreviated to "Adv. In the example below, you can clearly see that the description line and URL are significantly longer than with normal text.
Expanded Text Ad
- The headline of an ETA is a lot bigger, allowing you to put in more concrete information.
- In addition, the visible URL is now also larger and you can use the two URL paths to create a more specific URL that better matches the user's search intent.
Google expects the Click-Through-Rate (CTR) of ETAs to increase by 20% due to these benefits. This sounds interesting and we will soon start testing what the differences in CTR between standard text ads and ETAs are on various devices. However, the question remains what the impact of these new ads on CTR will be when everyone starts using these ads in the future. Below I briefly list the differences between the standard text ad and ETA for you:
| Standard text ad | Expanded Text Ad |
| - Header: 25 characters | - Heading 1: 30 characters |
| - Description line 1: 35 characters | - Header 2: 30 characters |
| - Description line 2: 35 characters | - Description line: 80 characters |
| - Visible URL: 35 characters | - Visible URL path: 2 x 15 characters |
What are the benefits and implications of Expanded Text Ads?
Right now we can still experiment and measure the differences in performance between standard text ads and ETAs, but it looks like we won't have long to choose as Google plans to move completely from standard text ads to Expanded Text Ads later this year. So what are the benefits of this new ad format?
Prominent presence
ETAs offer almost half as much ad space, making ads thus a lot bigger and more visible. An ad like this takes up more screen space on mobile and is thus more prominent on screen. With more visibility, you increase the chance that users will click on your ad and this is therefore likely to contribute positively to the CTR of your ad.
Relevance and quality score
A big advantage is the extra line in the header, which creates significantly more space. This gives opportunities to improve the quality score, since you can write more relevant ads with more text. For example, before, the keywords "Compare energy suppliers" did not fit in the headline, whereas now this is possible and additional information can be added in the second headline to increase the relevance of the ad.
Organic search results
The ratio of organic search results to ads is coming under pressure because of Google's recent Google Ads updates. Removing the right-hand column already led to an additional top spot, which now allows four ads to appear above the search results. If there are four large ETAs here and they include various types of ad extensions, the organic search results will be pushed down considerably (to below the fold)!
Conclusion
Expanded Text Ads allow advertisers to deploy more relevant and prominent ads that are expected to receive a higher click rate. These larger ads are likely to push the organic search results down more, changing the appearance of the search results page(SERP).
