No one could ever accuse Google of letting their services become stagnant. The company, much like their competitors, is constantly looking for ways to improve their existing products. This MO even applies to their primary moneymaker: the Google advertising system, which consists of AdWords and AdSense.
One of the key components to these text-based AdWords ads besides the keywords being targeted is the description of the ad users are observing. Normally, this description is limited to 70 characters. However, according to numerous reports (I’ll link to MarketingVOX because that’s the first one I came across), Google has selected a number of beta testers and will allow them to experiment with an increased allotment of description characters, which for the test purposes, is 200 characters.
Those selected were notified by an email that explained the goal of this particular test. MarketingVOX has a quote from the email, which says:
We will alternate showing your regular ad text with the longer version of the text. We plan to experiment with slight layout variations of the longer ad text in order to determine which layout design will perform the best.
Once these changes are implemented, Google will then test the click-thru-rate of these ads by alternating them with ads featuring the standard description character count.
According to SERoundtable, the descriptions are the only things about these ads that will change. This means the longer ads will be based on pre-existing ads that feature the normal description. The only thing that changes about these normal ads is the longer description. The ad title and its accompanying URLs will remain the same. This is being done to determine which style performs the best. Google is also planning on making slight alterations to the layout of the ads featuring the increased character count.
Chris Richardson is a search engine writer and editor for Murdok. Visit Murdok for the latest search news.
