Our team of digital marketing experts has implemented a weekly series, Ask the Experts, dedicated to answering dealers’ questions regarding L2TMedia’s solutions and best practices. The success of our dealerships is our number one priority and we know that many of our clients have questions when it comes to what we do. So ask away!

What are the biggest changes to Google’s new expanded text ads and how is this beneficial to my campaign?

 
Expanded Text Ads (ETAs) were one of several huge AdWords changes Google has made in the past couple months. Google is calling this the “biggest change to text ads since AdWords launched 15 years ago.” As part of AdWords Editor 11.5, ETAs offer nearly 50% more text to highlight products and services before individuals even click on your ad. ETAs show across all devices – desktop and mobile – and will wrap automatically based on device size.

Google’s guide to ETAs explains that this next generation of text ads differs from standard text ads in a few ways:

• Two headline fields (up to 30 characters each)
• A single, expanded description field (up to 80 characters)
• A display URL that uses your final URL’s domain
• Two optional “Path” fields, used in the ad’s display URL (up to 15 characters each)

The new ads are designed to maximize your presence and performance on mobile search results with a bigger headline and an extra-long description. With the growing importance of mobile-first thinking, changes that are made to mobile also apply to desktop.

The increase in character limits and components allows our specialists to utilize more keywords and write stronger call-to-actions in our dealers’ ads. This ultimately results in improved click thru rates and higher quality scores. More text means greater visibility and reports are indicating that ETAs are seeing increases in CTR by as much as 20 percent.

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