Google Adwords is a great tool to use when it comes to advertising your business online and increasing sales/enquiries on the world’s most popular search engine. It has a range of products that allows you to search the appropriate keywords, provide you with suggestions that could appeal to your audience as well as allow you to generate original ideas so you can rank high on Google. The three types of ads when creating a Search advert in Google Adwords are Dynamic Search ads, Responsive Search ads and Expanded Text ads. Nevertheless, the main purpose of this article is to mainly focus on what Expanded Text ad offers compared to the other two, and why Google AdWords have decided to remove it for future use.

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What is an Expanded Text ad?

Expanded Text Ads are the “old school” adverts where you simply create what headline and what descriptions you’d like to use. Google allows you three Headline (30 characters each), two description fields giving you the opportunity to write up to 90 characters the way you want it to be displayed as an advert, and you’re also able to add a display URL. What’s positive about this for those who wish to have full control over your advert, is the fact that they can enter extended descriptions which in turn would make optimisation more effective. However, we’re in a day and age where testing is important and continuous improvement is imperative to a business’ success. Expanded Text Ads don’t make it easy to create test versions, you’d have to create multiple adverts to generate effective split testing, which is why Google introduced Responsive Search Ads and have seen huge success as a result.

When are Expanded Text ads being removed?

In August 2021, Google AdWords announced that from the 30th of June 2022, Responsive Search ads will be the only ad type people will be able to create from scratch and edit. Expanded Text ads will no longer be available to create ad content. Google AdWords felt it would ‘make it easier’ for people to go to the appropriate pages. Nevertheless, current Expanded Text ads would remain to run alongside your Responsive ads.

Why has Google decided to move on from Expanded text ads?

Google prioritises relevancy as a key factor when producing adverts on the Search Network. As previously highlighted, Expanded Text ads are now viewed as ‘old school’ and it doesn’t give advertisers opportunities to create one relevant advert for various keywords they may be targeting in a particular ad group. The release of Responsive and Dynamic adverts allows this,

and Google favours these types of adverts because of the better ad relevancy scores.

What is a Responsive search ad?

A Responsive Search ad is when you create variations of headlines (maximum of 15) and descriptions (maximum of 4) for Google to choosefrom based on ad relevancy and end goal performances during the campaign. Thkeywords you choose should be relevant to the keywords you’re targeting in your ad group, as well as adding your company USPs to help with ad relevancy and adscore. This is almost the halfway house between giving Google the full control of your adverts and the advertiser choosing exactly what the adverts should be. Since it’s induction, click through rates and conversion rates have increased. You’re also able to “pin” a certain keyword that you believe is important tothe business on all adverts with this option- although Google will give you a lower ad score however this can be tested and if used correctly, will help with your final goal (increase conversions/website visits).

The main disadvantage with Responsive Search Ads is that although you may have some control over the type of keywords and descriptions, you would not have control over the way Google alternates your content – forcing you at times to make your description more generic than you perhaps would have want it to be so they make sense if they were either in position 1 or 2.

Dynamic Search Ads

On the other hand, Dynamic search ads are adverts displayed on Google based on the content you have on your website. This is done by Google extracting content from your website to match your content to what people search via the Google Search Engine. This could be great as it has a potential to lead more ‘relevant’ consumers to your website based on what they search and what your website offers.

Other advantages – This will ensure Google will give you a high relevancy score which is one of the main factors for Google showing you in positions 1 and 2 in the ad sections. This is Google’s preferable ad option at the moment, therefore Google may favour competitor adverts that are choosing dynamic adverts.

Although you’re likely to receive a very high relevancy score from Google, one of the issues you could face is that you’re not in control of what content Google decides to take from your website for an advert. Therefore, there could be content that you would prioritise in an advert that Google would miss – i.e a unique USP. If there are spelling mistakes within your web page content, Google would not correct this too – so any mistypes or anything like this could show in your Google adverts.

Dynamic adverts must be split tested with Responsive Search ads to ensure you’re benefitting from them with your end goal – for example Lead Generation, Sales. Dynamic Adverts could be perfect for blogs and articles however it’s not evident yet if they are beneficial across all industries.

What you should do before the changes are implemented?

1. Set up a couple of Expanded Text ads to go with your Responsive ads
2. Test the Expanded Text ads now and see how it would work with your Responsive Ads
3. Create and test some Dynamic Search ads to see which ad variation give you the best results

Ideally, mixing these ads by using them appropriately and correctly would be the best way to manage your ads to increase your ad positions on Google which will generate you’re a better click-through rate and conversions. However, without Expanded Text ads, the only option would be to use Responsive Search ads should you wish to have some control over your ads and still use some of your previous Expanded Text ads. The key thing would be to test each Ad Variant and use the adverts which deliver you the best results as some businesses are going to find that Responsive Adverts are the better ads for them where others will prefer to use Dynamic Adverts moving forward.