The Biggest Change In Text Ads Since The Beginning of AdWords

There’s a new ad format in town. Responsive Ads are a new beta ad format for search and display.

Why is this the biggest change ever to ad formats? These ad formats mark a huge transformation in ad creation philosophy. Rather than the campaign manager building ads directly, they will provide AdWords with multiple text snippets, call to actions and unique selling points that can be assembled into ad headlines and descriptions. It’s almost like AdWords is writing your text ads, but—even better—they’re also handling the ad copy optimization!

This change also facilitates a shift away from campaign manager directed manual A/B testing. It aligns the power of the campaign manager’s business knowledge with the benefits of artificial intelligence and machine learning – to get the best possible ads in any given context.

Ultimately, it’s likely to be hugely positive because the job of the campaign manager moves from honing ad copy to identifying a campaign’s distinctive characteristics and providing them to AdWords. Once a campaign is launched, a campaign manager can focus more of their efforts on optimization and improvement. It’s a win all around!

It’s also useful for AI since AdWords can leverage the breadth of campaigns it’s running to build upon the best performing ads.

Interested in the Details?

Responsive search ads…

• Allow up to 15 headlines to be provided.
• Allow up to 4 descriptions. What’s more, total description text moves from 80 to 180 characters.
• Three headlines are shown at one time.
• Two descriptions are shown.
• Allow headline and descriptions to be “pinned” to position one, two or three.
• Limitations: you must have content items without replacement tags to make sure at least one ad is generated.

Should You Use Responsive Ads?

Going forward, this new ad format will compete with Expanded Text Ads in the auction and will be displayed alongside the existing ad format. With much more ad content, this will likely take up more space on the SERP and, if that happens, one might expect a higher click-through rate.

Given all of this, we can expect the Responsive Ad format to be become the defacto standard over time, replacing the Expanded Text Ad as this latter format replaced the Text Ad before it. Hence, now is the time to start thinking about the new ad, and to consider trying it out on some of your campaigns as it becomes available to you in the AdWords UI.

Will Acquisio Support Responsive Ads?

The short answer is yes! Artificial intelligence and machine learning are in our DNA and we’re always delighted to see these advanced technologies being used to improve the outcomes of campaigns.

We foresee starting with support for Reporting first and then implementing more management oriented advanced features over time. We’re really excited about this new format and can’t wait to see what advantages it can bring.

Image Credits

Feature Image: Unsplash /Ross Findon