Google Expanded Text Ads – First Impressions & Results

When attempting to update an ad in one of our accounts this morning, we were pleasantly surprised to find that the Expanded Text Ads Beta have finally become available! As such, we dropped what we were doing, got in gear and raced to get these updated as quickly as possible across our key accounts! We’re quite excited at what this could mean in super competitive SERPS such as iGaming were even tiny differentials in CTR can lower costs substantially and wanted to share a few choice screenshots of how these ads look “in the wild”. Some publications have been touting expected CTR improvements of as much as 20% and it will be very interesting to see if we can replicate these in our initial tests: If you’ve been keeping tabs on the ads format in recent days, you might also have noticed that Google snuck in another another update around changing the Ad button from orange to green. This now makes the paid ads look remarkably like organic results and further blurs the distinction between paid and organic results… One of the major benefits of Expanded Text Ads, is the range you have when adding in features, USP’s and Calls to Action. Creating a sense of urgency on top of this makes your ad that much more potent, and Expanded Text Ads allow for the inclusion of the Countdown feature, as seen below:  While the format is still in beta, Google have been clear that the ads won’t have the same potential reach as regular copy and that performance may not be as consistent. The recommendation is that the expanded text ads should be run in conjunction with regular ads for the best effect. While we are excited to get expanded text ads live and start testing different ad variations, we will be keeping a close eye on performance against existing copy, to see how effective these really are.

Scroll to Top