A Massive Change to Adwords Is Coming

July 12, 2016 / By Jonny Craft

It’s official, later this year advertisers will get more advertising power as Google AdWords are rolling out expanded text ads on all devices.

For the last 15 years, AdWords has adopted the 25–35–35 character rule when it comes to writing paid ads for your website. This is to increase to 30–30–80 later this year. The old format allowed the advertiser one 25-character headline followed by two 35-character descriptions lines. The new format will consist of two 30-character headlines and one 80-character description line. Google have also tinkered with the Display URL. Before if this display URL didn’t match your landing page URL your ad would have been declined for misdirection. Now the landing page URL is automatically extracted from the final URL allowing the advertiser to customise the URL path. AdWords users have welcomed this change, seeing the increased text allowance as more opportunities to sell their service/product.

Google started testing these changes a few months ago and last month in a blog post said:

“These upgrades help your ads work harder across screens, especially for the on-the-go mobile consumer that wants to know exactly what you offer before tapping into your website”.

Furthermore, the removal of R-H-S (Right Hand Side) ads has also allowed this character increase and at the same time allowed the ads to remain uniform across all devices, again with the emphasis on mobile.

Summary

It is not known when these changes will appear in your paid ad console but we reckon you should start planning for them now so you can hit the ground running. This latest update to appease mobile users is just another signal that desktop searches are on the decline.