Basically, it appears that Google is potentially using the first line of an ad’s description and appending it onto the headline.  This is actually a very big deal.  The headline of an ad has great impact on the ad’s CTR% – how much always varies by situation, but it is typically the most significant element of an ad in terms of affecting CTR%.

By appending potentially 35 more characters onto the previous 25 characters permitted in a headline, Google has more than doubled the headline real estate and made yet another element for savvy advertisers to test.

Likely, advertisers at or near the top positions for higher volume keywords will see this headline extension.  An important point to note is that Google’s announcement seems to place a special emphasis on ‘proper punctuation’ appearing at the end of the first description line in order for this new headline extension to be triggered.

This is an opportunity for more testing and ad tweaks, which may or may not benefit a client in every situation.  It doesn’t seem like there is an ability to ‘opt-out’ of this change.

And the testing fun continues…

Testing and bid adjustments are always needed, but this channel shouldn’t be ignored because the setup requires some work.  The ability to add new traffic that is pretty sure to meet your goals/targets is a good opportunity worth testing.

When signed into an AdWords account and using the ad preview tool, there are some great settings/controls that make testing your ads much easier.  When dealing with things like geographic targeting, the new settings to preview ads for specific locations make debugging or discovering issues much easier.

In addition, the ad preview tool reveals which adgroup is actually causing your ad to be displayed.  This function has been extremely helpful for those tricky adgroups where testing certain exact match keywords butts heads with other more broadly-focused adgroups.  I found a couple situations in the last week where the addition of certain negative keywords was necessary to help Google display ads for unproven test adgroups.

All in all, a useful tool and one I’m glad to be using.

This development has now been rolled out to most/all(?) users.

So, should you care about this change?  Well, yes and no.  There isn’t anything advertisers can do about it, so in that sense, why bother with it.  On the other hand, this change will likely have an impact on ad CTR’s and as a result, you should be prepared to do more display URL testing.

Google tests, we test, test – test – test.

Not sure what ‘remarketing’ is? In theory, remarketing allows display advertisers to show specific ads to users who have visited designated page/pages on their website. These ads can be as tailored and specific as desired and offer advertisers to target a group of people who are very highly desirable – visitors who have previously checked out particular pages of an advertisers site and done some tire-kicking.

Now, why should this matter to advertisers? Well, unfortunately potential customers rarely make a purchase on their first visit to any given site. Consumers move through the buying cycle from research mode to purchase more slowly than that. Remarketing is an advertiser’s opportunity to reach out to previous visitors and try to woo them back for a purchase.

This ability should be thoroughly tested and exploited for the benefit to the advertiser’s business. Reaching out to consumers who are further along the buying cycle with your message is a great opportunity. Don’t ignore it by being ‘lazy’ or ‘too busy’ to make this opportunity another advantage over your competitors.