Is there any doubt that Google is the place to advertise? With over 3.5 billion searches per day, your potential customers are using Google to search – but are they finding you? Like all things internet, Google never stands still and they just announced new Search Ad formats including Responsive Text Ads and Extended Text Ads. Both of these give you more characters to convey your message to customers and the responsive text ads allow you to test different messages to automatically optimize to the highest performing ads. Here is what you need to know.

Old Format Ads:

New Extended Text Ads – The anatomy of the standard Google Search ad was 2 Headlines of 30 characters each and one Description line of 80 characters, plus your display URL. Google has added an additional headline (30 characters), upped the Description line to 90 characters AND added an additional description line, making the total possible character count 270, almost double the original ad character count of 140.

Responsive Text Ads – The anatomy of the Responsive Text ads is the same as the new extended text ads, however you can add additional headline and description lines. Google will then test different combinations of your headlines and descriptions to see which bring you the most site visitors and/or conversions. This is extremely powerful if you want to determine which call-to-action or slogan is resonating best with your customers and motivating them to interact with your brand. One caveat to the responsive text ads: all the headlines and descriptions have to make sense in any combination, so keep that in mind when you are building you ads.

New Format Ads:

At this time, Google is not forcing any Ad accounts to update their ads, so your old formatted Search ads will continue running. However, make no mistake – your competitors will be taking advantage of these additional character counts and you should too!