Dive Brief:
- User experience has become a point of focus for the digital advertising community and the rise of mobile has helped bring that about. With a mobile-first user experience in mind, Google has announced changes to its core AdWords search ad product.
- AdWords ad headlines (from 25 to 30 characters) and descriptions (from 35 to 80 characters) can now be longer. Other changes include new local search ad options, and testing of Promoted Pins on Google Maps.
- The Wall Street Journal speculated that the move is happening because Google is seeing a slowdown in growth of its net ad revenue, citing eMarketer research that forecast it will only increase 9% this year compared to 15% in 2015.
Dive Insight:
Patrick Moorhead, founder of Moor Insights & Strategy, told the Journal, “They’re doing this now because they foresee a revenue or profit challenge ahead. There’s nothing positive for the user here.”
At the same time the larger headlines and descriptions will help marketers out for ads served on mobile devices; Google testing found as much as 20% higher clickthrough rates on ads with longer headlines and descriptions. Google’s takeaway from that test was mobile users want more information before taking the step to click on ads. If that’s the case, longer headlines and descriptions – at least for mobile ads – might actually offer a better user experience given Google’s research showed it's what mobile users want.
Google has relied on internal research for previous expansions of its ads, such as just recently adding ads to image searches after learning that mobile users said product images are the shopping feature they use the most.
The Journal reported that Google is actively making changes to its ad offering in order meet the shift to mobile devices which now account for more than half of Google searches.
