There are always a lot of changes happening in Adwords, especially in 2011. We have seen a lot of new additions, updates and policy changes that seem to occur more often than ever. To keep you updated with everything in Adwords land we will briefly review the top 3 changes to ad format in Adwords.
1) Adwords display URLs no longer show capital letters
So what does this mean for advertisers? Well first you should note that most ads would show a domain in this format, MySite.com/Cool-Stuff. This will now display as mysite.com/Cool-Stuff. In my experience the upper case “/Cool-Stuff” does not mesh well with the lower cased domain. We recommend changing all letters in a display URL (including those after the “/”) to lowercase format. Leaving the domain lowercase with subdirectories upper case just looks too much like spam and, in most cases, your CTR will drop as a result.
2) Longer ad headlines now displaying
Yes, that’s right. An ad will display description line 1 next to the ad title now if it meets the following criteria:
-The ad has a high enough ad rank to display above search results
-The ad has a description line 1 that ends with proper punctuation
These ads look much better than previously top ranked ads and many argue this will improve CTR overall. When you couple this with 4 sitelink extensions you will have a great CTR. Whether the increased CTR brings in a higher ROI is dependent on your advertising goals.
3) Google Checkout no longer displays in ad copy
Google has finally dropped the Google Checkout badges from its Adwords program. This was mainly instituted to clean up search results. The new Google +1 will be displayed and this feature in Adwords should really boost +1 adoption.
Will the removal of Google Checkout badges from ads hurt the adoption of Google Checkout? We think it will as many clients with newer sites installed Google Checkout specifically to boost Adwords ad performance.