Google Expanded Text Ads SEM Case Study
August 2016
In August of 2016, google had released an update to its standard text ads. These took the ads from a single headline of 25 characters, and two description lines of 35 characters to two headlines at 30 characters and a single description line at 80 characters. This was a major change that came with the claim that CTR could increase dramatically. We decided to test it out to see if there is a massive performance increase with these ads. We approached some of our existing clients to try out the new format to see if there was an increase in performance.
The first test with the same ad text - just expanded with additional detail.
In the first round of testing, we had ads duplicate in the same ad group. The only difference is that we added additional text on to these ads for the expanded ads. The message across both of these ads were the same, but the expanded text ads had said the same thing with just a bit more embellishment to the ad. Below is the standard text ads compared to the expanded text ads that had similar ad text.
StandardText Ads (Same Ad Experiment)
|
|
IMP |
Clicks |
CTR |
AVG POS |
|
Ad 1 |
1221 |
36 |
2.95% |
1.3 |
|
Ad 2 |
885 |
14 |
1.58% |
1.7 |
|
Ad 3 |
1973 |
30 |
1.52% |
2 |
|
TOTAL |
4079 |
80 |
1.96% |
1.66 |
Google Expanded Text Ads (Same Ads With Additional Text - Same AdGroup)
|
|
IMP |
Clicks |
CTR |
AVG POS |
|
Ad 1 |
39 |
1 |
2.56% |
1.6 |
|
Ad 2 |
94 |
4 |
4.26% |
1.5 |
|
Ad 3 |
402 |
4 |
1% |
2.8 |
|
TOTAL |
535 |
9 |
1.68% |
1.96 |
The second test with two different ads for the same service. These ads were written very differently from their standard ad counterpart.
The second test had text ads compete where the text in the expanded ads were completely different from the standard ads. This allowed for a better flowing ad text and not just tacking on additional text to see about grabbing some more screen real estate.
Standard Google Text Ad (Not Expanded)
|
|
IMP |
Clicks |
CTR |
AVG POS |
|
Ad 1 |
596 |
12 |
2.01% |
1.1 |
|
Ad 2 |
646 |
10 |
1.55% |
1.2 |
|
Ad 3 |
281 |
6 |
2.14% |
1.1 |
|
TOTAL |
1523 |
28 |
1.83% |
1.13 |
Google Expanded Ad Written Differently From Its Standard Ad Counterpart
|
|
IMP |
Clicks |
CTR |
AVG POS |
|
Ad 1 |
799 |
13 |
1.63% |
2 |
|
Ad 2 |
568 |
9 |
1.58% |
2.1 |
|
Ad 3 |
196 |
4 |
2.04% |
3.5 |
|
TOTAL |
1563 |
26 |
1.66% |
2.53 |
Do Google Expanded Text Ads Improve Performance Over Standard Ads?
From our 2 week test on the highest performing ads (by CTR and Clicks) we found only one area that the expanded text ads had a performance improvement. It was when the ads were completely re-written, that is when we saw a very slight increase in impressions (40) , the clicks remained just about the same, but the average position of these ads dropped. The CTR stayed very similar. So far we don't see any evidence of a performance increase with these new text ads.