Expanded text ads: the results so far

Innovations / August 09, 2016

Now that Expanded Text Ads (ETAs) have rolled out across Google AdWords, we became very curious: How is this significant change affecting Bloom PPC campaigns across the board? So we asked the team: what’s really happening out there on the front lines?

This is what they told us: ETAs are generally resulting in higher clickthrough rates (CTRs), lower costs per click, but no increase in conversions. That, in our book, is very much a win, as it’s resulting in a lower cost per acquisition on a number of campaigns. More conversions would of course be better, but we’ll take more traffic at a lower cost any day.

What we learned (and continue learning)

According to our PPC Specialist Jeff Johnson: “I’m generally seeing higher CTR across the board (with some variances). Conversion rate is the one that is harder hit. With more clicks, keeping the conversion rate high has been difficult.”

Across the board there is little consistency based on vertical. Some of our ecommerce clients (but not all) are seeing considerably higher clickthrough rates on their ETAs — with increases up to 60% and even 250%. While most of our hospitality and lodging campaign ETAs have remained consistent, or have experienced small increases.

One exception is a hospitality AdGroup that whose ETAs are driving a 59% lower CPA, and a 148% higher conversion rate. Jeff explains: “It looks like the key to the success of these ads is to create a compelling headline two that compliments the text, not simply copying an old ad and adding new text.”

Geographically speaking, ETAs on one of our campaigns targeted to France resulted in a 200% conversion rate. PPC Specialist Antoine Paulet speculates “ Maybe less people are doing it in France; it’s still pretty new.”

Keep optimizing

While great ads can lead customers to your site, optimized content plays a huge role in driving those conversions. AdWords’ new ETAs are a classic example of how you can create a bigger, better and with more scintillating information, but they’re not a panacea. Done right however, they are awesome at driving traffic and improving your cost per acquisition. But the jury is still out. Many campaigns are still running exclusively with the old ads. Once everyone has implemented ETAs and after AdWords disables the old text ads, it will be a brand new game.