How to Get More than 25 Characters in your AdWords Ads Headline
Feb 26th, 2009 | By David Rothwell | Category: ARTICLES, Google Agency Partner EMEA
Google is currently experimenting with headlines longer than the traditional 25 characters
Read the headlines above and carefully count the characters in each – there’s 28.
Reported to me by a client today (thanks Raj) Google is now allowing more than the usual 25 characters in the headline field.
Since AdWords has *always* restricted this field, I tried to quickly reproduce this myself, and having failed both in Editor and online, then immediately called my Account Manager for an explanation.
She was unsurprised – turns out they’ve been quietly experimenting with this for a week or so without telling anyone, and "there’s no guarantee it will remain".
However, I have yet to see any new AdWords feature rescinded (my Account Manager had the same, though personal, opinion) and I expect to see this roll out permanently.
She also informed me there’s no fixed character count as yet, so we’ll have to experiment further with it to see it’s limitations.
There’s a few other blog posts about this, reporting the same findings and a variety of headline character counts, up to 31.
So – how is it done?
And why?
Answers:
- Dynamic Key Insertion
- To increase CTR (my conjecture)
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David,
Thanks for finally shedding some light on this!
I noticed it yesterday and couldn’t believe my eyes. Twittered about it and asked other well known adwords experts to see if anyone else knew anything about it and came up with nothing. Finally sent an email to Perry and Bryan and Bryan led me here.
The interesting thing though is I thought it was being done thru the API and not DKI because the results I saw it for didn’t include my actual search query. (i.e. I searched for “whitewater rafting california” and the headline of the ad was “California Whitewater Rafting”
Anyways, thanks for the insight. Hopefully they’ll make it a permanent change soon.
Teddy Garcia
http://www.GearedLocal.com
Hi Teddy,
Many thanks for your comment. I’m glad Bryan was able to send you here.
I suspected DKI may be the mechanism but rather than spend time trying to test it out I just took the quick approach and called my Google manager – call me lazy!
I need to do some more testing on this to assess the full possibilities. Don’t forget you can use a DKI field *anywhere* in your ad, so maybe this is a way to increase the text size from 35 too… (!)
The only limitation to keep in mind is that *only* the keywords in your list will show up – Google doesn’t expand what the DKI field serves even though it will for Broad and Phrase match keywords to show your ad against.
DKI can sometimes increase CTR since it gives back exactly what the user searched for, in bold (providing it was in your list of keywords and does not violate the field length).
I used to use and test it a lot, but now I tend to build ad groups with only a single keyword (even if I have thousands) so have needed it less and less (a simple spreadsheet and AdWords Editor makes this easy – there’s an article on the site).
However, this development has raised its profile again and I shall certainly be looking at it more closely.
Please let me know any other thoughts, ideas and findings you have, or if there’s anything else you need help with.
David,
Thanks for the details… one other question based on something you said…
“now I tend to build ad groups with only a single keyword (even if I have thousands) ”
I use SpeedPPC to do the same thing however I’m noticing that when I do this the impression share I get is a lot lower than when I use just a few adgroups in a campaign. Is there a sweet spot for max # of adgroups you should have in a single campaign? Does having a ton of adgroups trigger a more thorough manual review?
Thanks in advance..
-Teddy