Google has introduced the first significant change to the structure of its text ads in 15 years, a move that Ramsbottom-based technology company Dream Agility claims is great news for agencies that have witnessed a steady erosion in revenue since the 2013 debut of Google Shopping. At the same time, retailers will have hundreds or even thousands of adverts that now need changing in order to secure the best possible results.
The global launch of expanded text adverts, introduced to better serve the billions of people now accessing the internet through their mobile phones, provide advertisers with the opportunity to include more detail in their adverts – a function that has been proven to increase an advert's effectiveness by up to 20 per cent.
Dream Agility CEO Elizabeth Clark – whose company was recently recognised by Google as one the leading Google Shopping experts in Europe, the Middle East and Africa – explains: "Google advertising has grown year-on-year for the last decade and 2016 will continue that trend, but text ads have been in decline since the launch of Shopping and the loss of the right hand side of the page. However, the news today that being able to export your text ads into expanded text ads, which provide considerably more descriptive space, is a boon for those retailers still dependent upon them.”
Why the good news for agencies? In short, they will be able to use a simple feed to generate thousands of highly relevant, flawlessly presented adverts for their clients that include vital information such as price, SKUs, etc. which to do so manually would be extremely arduous.
Clark continues: "It needn’t be as big a task as they might fear. Our patent-pending, award-winning technology makes dealing with these changes a painless and very profitable experience because we’ve made it so simple, literally at the touch of a button.”
Speaking at the 2016 Google Performance Summit Sridhar Ramaswamy, Google's senior vice president of advertising and commerce, said: "In rebuilding search ads for this mobile first world, we've made two critical changes.
"(First) our research shows that adverts with longer headlines are more useful to mobile users because they provide more information before they actually touch.
"We've also expanded the number of characters that can be in your description line: we now have one long 80-character description line. Combined with your new headlines, that's nearly 50 per cent more ad text to highlight your products and services.
"Based on early testing, some of our advertisers have reported an increase in click-through-rate of more than 20 per cent compared to traditional text adverts. Taking advantage of this format early will be critical to your success."
Dream Agility is a multi-million pound feed management and ad tech company backed by software tycoon Derek Lilley whose previous ventures include SaaS platform Fourth Hospitality.
