I often joke that Google AdWords makes so many changes that after a long weekend, I may log in and not be able to recognize it anymore. Some of their most recent changes are, in my years of managing Adwords, more baffling than changes of the past.
The first change that was rolled out in late January, is that AdWords display URLs no longer contain capitalization. For example, an add that used to look like this:
Ecreativeworks Distributor Support
Super Awesome Solutions For
Sharing your Manufacturer’s Catalog
www.DistributorSupport.com
Now look like this:
Ecreativeworks Distributor Support
Super Awesome Solutions For
Sharing your Manufacturer’s Catalog
www.distributorsupport.com
However, Google AdWords has made it acceptable to capitalize letters in sub folders so www.distributorsupport.com/How-It-Works.php is still a go. This change was particularly surprising to me as Google themselves once listed using upper and lower case URL’s as best practice in their help section as a way to increase CTR, or Click-Through Rate and for AdWords practitioners like myself, it was an optimization no-brainer.
Google Extended Headlines the Reason?
My theory as to why they did this was to make paid search results better masquerade with organic results. The reason that I subscribe to this theory is because the other big change is the extension of ad headlines-another way for paid search to appear as organic search.
What used to look like this:
Now looks like this:
Google gets to select which ads they extend the headlines for. Ads with the extended headline will only appear above the Google organic results. According to the Google Inside AdWords blog, “While only some ads will be shown with the longer headline, you can increase your chances by ensuring that each line of your ad appears to be a distinct sentence and ends in the proper punctuation…”
Only select AdWords, notified by email, have access to this feature right now and I’m predicting that it’ll be rolled out to all AdWords users before long.
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