Last month at the Google Marketing Live event, Google introduced responsive search ads. The new search ad layout is designed to work hand in hand with Google’s machine learning technology. Starting in September, reponsive search ads will be rolled out to the majority of advertisers in English, French, German and Spanish, with other languages to follow. This means that advertisers will now have the ability to introduce a third headline and a second description into there ads which may be 90 characters long. Currently advertisers have an 80 character limit.
The core purpose of these new search ads is to help deliver the best ad for any search query, so again, a heavy focus on relevance seems to be the major priority for Google in paid search and also across the ditch in organic search as we have seen in the recent August algorithm update.
In Google’s official update, they mentioned that “One of the advantages of responsive search ads is that they give you more room to convey your message. While we work on improving responsive search ads across languages, it’s important to extend that same advantage to your existing text ads.”
What will the impact be for advertisers adopting these new search ads? Well as Google mentioned, you will have the ability to convey more of your message, by providing more detail in your ads. With effective responsive search ads and the right detail, you should experience better click through rates (CTR) and depending on your ad copy, a more qualified click as users will be presented with more detail about your service or product without clicking. If worked into your strategy properly, these ad formats are purposely designed to provide you a more relevant click and in return higher conversion rates.