PPC or Pay Per Click is a common tool used by advertisers to market their business on Google Search. When carrying out a search on Google, users are presented with organic search results and paid search results. The paid search results will appear at the top of the page with an “Ad” icon next to them.
One of the common PPC ads comes in a text ad format. A text ad is made up of headline text, description and a display URL. Google recently updated the text ad format by increasing the content that could be included within the ad, to help better explain whatever is being advertised and improve the click through rate.
So what changes did Google make?
In your expanded text ad, you can now include a third headline and a second description, each of which can comprise of 90 characters.
Your headline is made up of 30 characters and should be used to catch the attention of the user. It should contain the words or phrases entered during the search. Successful descriptions often use a “call to action”, encouraging viewers to take a specific action such as Buy Now, Call Now or Shop Now. The destination URL will be displayed within the ad, which should indicate what sort of information you can expect to find if you click on the link.
You should keep in mind that on smaller devices your text ads might not display all three headlines and two descriptions, so you should make sure that your critical information remains in the first 2 headlines and text description.
There has been some confusion over responsive search ads and text ads since the changes have been introduced. Text ads still allow you full control over the information you are choosing to display. Responsive ads on the other hand, use machine learning to decipher which combination of headlines and descriptions it should display to a user.
So get cracking on those extra descriptions and start improving your click through rate today.