Extended Text Ads Are Going Away,
Here’s How to Get Your Google Ads Account Ready

For those of you who are not already familiar with the Google Ads Grant you should look into it. Google offers $10,000 a month of in kind advertising through their search ads. You can get a primer on leveraging the Google Ads Grant for your ministry by checking out this episode of the ministry at scale podcast archives. 

If you’re already working with a Google Ads account, you’re likely using expanded text ads as part of your campaigns. When expanded text ads were first introduced it was an exciting opportunity to get additional visibility for your ads, and the ability to include more information within your ads through the addition of a third headline, and second description. In June of this year (2022) expanded text ads are going away. The good news is that your current expanded text ads will continue to run, and you can pause and restart them, you just won’t be able to add more or edit the current ads. 

Below is the notice you’ll see on the help docs that Google has provided:

Important

- Starting June 30, 2022, you’ll no longer be able to create or edit expanded text ads.

- Expanded text ads will continue to serve, and you'll still see reports on their performance going forward.

- You'll still be able to pause and resume your expanded text ads, or remove them if needed.

- We strongly encourage you to transition to responsive search ads.

- Learn more about this change to expanded text ads

To prepare for this change, you’ll want to start converting your ads over to Responsive Search Ads. There are a lot of benefits to Responsive Search Ads, but you’ll need to optimize them differently. Here are a few ways you can get the biggest impact out of this transition. 

First, understand how Responsive Search Ads work. They allow you to enter up to 15 headlines and 4 descriptions, and then Google uses machine learning to show the combinations that are most effective based on the user and the search terms. It’s a powerful way to test many variations, where things can get a little tricky is in ensuring that the variations can stand on their own while making sure they make sense in any combination or order. The Google help docs have some good tips on how to do this.

A few tricks that we’ve picked up along the way are:

1. Do some keyword research, you want each headline to be unique to ensure the ad doesn’t feel overly redundant. So look to some of the top-performing keywords within the ad group and build headlines around them.

2. Look at the questions your users are asking. You can find these even without the use of a keyword tool, simply by typing the keywords into the Google search box and see what comes up in the search suggest autocomplete recommendations. You can also search for the keywords and look at the question and answer search results.

3. Review and tweak regularly. Since these ads are driven by machine learning it’s a good idea to keep an eye on them as you might find some surprising combinations, especially when you’re just getting started. 

If you’ve already been leveraging responsive search ads, share your best tips, so we can all learn together. 

Happy optimizing!