New Features

As advertisers our job isn’t just to reach people; it’s to reach the right people, the ones who have a genuine interest in what you have to offer. Last month Google announced a slew of new features coming to Google AdWords at their annual Performance Summit that will help us, as advertisers, reach the right customers. Of these new features, there are two behemoths that stole the spotlight; Expanded Text Ads and Demographic Targeting.

Expanded Text Ads

One of Google’s main highlights was Expanded Text Ads, which should make fighting character limits a thing of the past. Currently we’re limited to 95 characters (25 for the headline, and 35 for each of the two description lines) but with Expanded Text Ads we’ll have 140 characters to work with, which is just over a 45% increase in total ad text space. We’ll have two 30 character headlines and one 80 character description line. If having two headlines seems strange to you, just consider how the ads currently show for the #1 ranked ad; Google is already moving the Description Line 1 to the headline area on the top ad.

Once our battle with character limits is more forgiving we can use this to our advantage in two different ways. We’ll be able to either further narrow in on appealing the right customers or we can make our ads more appealing on a broader spectrum. Which route you take will in large be determined by your goal; more traffic or higher conversion rates.

Demographic Targeting

While this was announced at the Performance Summit, there weren’t many details offered up. However, if it offers even a fraction of the demographic targeting that other platforms offer (I’m looking at you, Facebook) then it will be huge. Speaking of Facebook, we can use their insight data to get an idea on how to approach our demographic targeting once demographic targeting makes its way to AdWords.

Demographics as minor as gender or age would have a major impact on how we as advertisers not only structure campaigns, but also the message we push out. Again, as I mentioned before – our goal is not to just reach anyone with our message, but to reach the right people. With that, demographic targeting will allow us to pinpoint who we target and then write our message for that specific group of people.

Now, We Wait—And Prepare

While Google didn’t give any information on when these new features would be introduced, I imagine they will slowly roll them out in advance of the new AdWords UI coming (hopefully) next year. During the wait, here at GravityFree, we’ll be getting our A/B tests planned out and ready to launch for the release of these new exciting features.