Positives & Negatives of Expanded Text Ads – Drive Higher CTR in Google Ads

Expanded text ads – The good and the bad

Google Ads has now become synonymous with online business, given its reach and efficiency. Google, in the know of humongous growth of Ads in the coming years, engage in various developments to upgrade its services so that more advertisers get involved in it. Some may turn absolutely advantageous while others may trouble you in the long run. Incorporating both benefits and drawbacks, Expanded Text Ads came into the picture replacing traditional version of standard ads, in the year 2016.

What are Expanded Text Ads? What effect do they have on Ads? To unravel such perplexities, let’s dig deep into the concept of ETA.

What are Expanded Text Ads?

Cited as the next generation of Text Ads by google, Expanded Text Ads allows the advertisers to provide more information for display on their ad. This beneficial in terms of message as user can have more amount of information at his disposal, without necessarily clicking the ad.

Features of Expanded Text Ads are as follows

• Three headlines, up to 30 characters each.

• Two (Expanded) description field, up to 90 characters

• Display URL should have the same domain as the final URL

• Two optional path fields in the display URL with up to 15 characters each

This is the format of the Expanded Text Ads. It is apparent that some of its features such as display URL using the same domain as the final URL and extension of character count are indeed helpful in curbing the regular concerns of messaging.

Why Expanded Text Ads?

Increase in usage of mobile phones is what propelled the idea of Expanded Text Ads. The majority of the world’s population carry smartphones and what’s a better time than this to begin extending our reach using mobile as a medium? It aims to engage mobile users in Expanded texts which enables greater visibility and information quality, given the extension of character limit.

After January 31, 2017, Google ceased to support any kind of creation or editing of standard Ads as every ad created must be in Expanded Text ad format.

Now let us ponder the pros and cons of the Expanded Text Ads.  This is very important to know if you are in pursuit of Digital Marketing Job. We help you learn all these concepts in our Digital Marketing Bootcamp program.

Positives:

• With the extension of the character limit, it is evident that Ads will be more specific and detailed.

• No need to worry about display URL matching the final URL domain as final URL domain is going to the display URL.

• With the larger visibility and more information, Ads are bound to grab the attention of potential customers.

• Optimization can be done more effectively as there is an increase in character count.

• You can witness a considerable increase in CTR because of the increased length of the ad, which enables more information for display.

Negatives:

• Though the increase in characters is said to an advantage, it often results in heavy competition for the top spot as there can be no more than one top spot.

• According to some experts, this might be an inconvenience for the businesses that are not dominant in their chosen occupational group as existing pioneers might dominate the SERP by occupying larger space.

• Chances of decrease in CTR is also apparent. This is because Ads on higher position take up much amount of space pushing other ads significantly down resulting in loss fall of CTR.

• Some experts say that it obscures the distinguishing line between paid and organic results as the extension of title and description characters making it ambiguous and almost equal to organic results.

Expanded Text Ads have their own share of good and bad. But it’s up to us that what we concern ourselves with. Good quality and efficient optimization would help your ad reach the top position. Hope this article is enlightening and productive. Please leave your views in the comment section.

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