There have been many changes over the last year to AdWords and yesterday at the Google Performance Summit, Google highlighted some of the plans for Adwords over the coming. The keynote was about all the moments that we go through in life and how Google will adapt their products accordingly.
Changing ads with a focus on mobile first
With ads already removed from the right hand side to align the desktop and mobile experience, we will now see further changes being made. The latest change could be seen as the biggest change to search ads since the start of Adwords.
Text ads are now expanding and we will see more ad space for text ads as can be seen in the table below:
| Upgraded Component | Current | Later this year |
| Headline | 25 characters | Two 30 character headlines |
| Description Lines | Two 35-character description lines | One consolidated 80-character description line |
| Display URL | Manually entered | Automatically extracted but can be customised |
So what will these ads look like?
The image below highlights how ads have changed significantly and will now allow for more text than ever before. The times when the perfect headline was 26 characters and you could not it in are over!
So, how will this affect you?
These changes will roll out later this year but because the limits are already provided, you can already start planning what additional USPs you would like to include in your ads. Writing these ads in advance and testing a combination of your USPs will provide you with a head start when we see this roll out.
We could also see search ads take a higher share of the clicks again from Shopping results, which are now dominating the overall volume of clicks in many accounts, now that more information can be given to the customer. This change would therefore have a larger impact on the overall search landscape and bidding techniques.
Finally, we have our full bid modification for devices back!
After the start of enhanced campaigns, we have not been able to modify our bids for tablets again which has often led to many times where you were not able to get the maximum out of your campaigns!
Now we will finally gain our independent bid modification back and with even higher bid adjustments on top of this. Your default cost per click that will be applied to mobile, desktop and tablet can now be adjusted up to 900% where this used to be +300%, providing a larger range of bid modification.
So, how will this affect you?
Whilst we are currently focussing our default bid around desktop devices, we will need to change our approach to bid modification and think mobile first. I think we can safely say we are delighted to have our mobile bid modification back!