Google has officially launched expanded text ads on its Google Adwords paid search platform. Also rolled out yesterday was the additional functionality of device bidding and responsive display ad’s.

What Does This Mean?

The existing standard text ad’s will continue to run alongside the new expanded text ad’s (ETA’s) until 26^th October 2016, however, advertisers can no longer create or upload new standard text ad’s. No date has yet been set by Google as to when the existing standard text ad’s will cease to run but Google have said they would expect PPC advertisers to carry out split testing – running standard ad’s and ETA’s against each other to ensure they are properly using the new ad format.

What is an Expanded Text Ad?

Expanded text ad’s include two headlines, each with a 30 character limit and a description of 80 characters. The extra ad space has been created by Google specifically to give mobile search users more information and said the expanded ad’s have been tested and proven to increase click through rates by as much as 20%.

Google has recently published a new best practices guide covering the use of expanded text ad’s and device bidding. This can be down loaded here

Separate Device Bidding Explained

Google Adwords advertisers will be able to set base bid adjustments for mobile, tablet and / or desktop. This update will take a few months to roll out across all Adwords accounts but Google is pushing its automated bidding tools (called “smart bidding”) and recommends that advertisers do not go back to separating their campaigns by device type. Automated bidding will take care of device bid adjustments and post roll out will have the ability to set target cost per acquisition (CPA) by device type.

Despite Google’s recommendations there is likely to be a fair bit of experimentation on manually adjusting bids for each device, especially by agencies such as ourselves who have the expertise and resource to test new campaign structures with separate device bidding.

Responsive Display Ad’s

Google also announced that display ad’s will auto-generate from a headline, description , image and URL provided by the advertiser. The ad’s will appear across the Google Display Network on all devices and more interestingly will be eligible for the native ad inventory Google has opened up across publishers on the Google Display Network.

Display advertisers must provide a short 25 character headline as well as a longer 90 character headline. Also required is a description of up to 90 characters, an image and the URL of the landing page for the ad. For more information on responsive ad’s please see the Google help page