URLs showing in top 3 advert headlines

[Gmorgan]

Anyone else seeing this? It looks very strange to me.

AdWords appears to be testing out URLs at the end of advert headings. So long as you are in the top 3 ads and so long as you have the shorter 'traditional' heading then it can show for you.

Seems to happen randomly right now, so here's a screenshot of what I saw:

[libertymarketing.co.uk ]

[ellegitimate]

interesting! Thanks for the info. Have you been able to track the effect of this?

[Gmorgan]

Not really, sorry. We've been seeing it on and off all day, and only for a couple of clients. We will have data to pull from soon, though at first glance it doesn't seem to be making much of a difference.

p.s. Can a mod please change "avert" to "advert" in the thread title?

[poster_boy]

Article discussing the change here [searchenginewatch.com]

[briggidere]

announced on the adwords blog now: [adwords.blogspot.com...]

[Olney]

In my personal opinion it looks bad.
They are testing it here in Japan too on at least highly competitive keywords.
There's a bug where it's cutting off the last character of some Japanese ads.

First they get rid of the option to display your client's Display URL within their brand guidelines(capitalization), then they bring the domain to the headline.
Visually it's not appealing

[Edwin]

That's going to add even more value to securing the exact-match domain for your main target keyphrase. Not only will it get bolded in the URL line (leading to a higher CTR, and therefore lower CPC) but it will now also potentially be bolded in the title too! (yes, I checked, matching keywords in the domain in the title do get bolded)

I imagine this will widen the cost gap between the smart companies who go with an exact-match domain strategy and their competition...

[Gmorgan]

Damn good point, Edwin.

[TravelSite]

Is there a way to turn this off? Our conversion rate has dropped from 13% to 4% - and it isn't being applied to our competitors.

[Edwin]

If you make your headline longer, it should automatically hide the domain name.

[areyougellin]

Our conversion rates have tanked since this change too. Now I'm converting all of our ads to have punctuation at the end of the first description line so at least the domain is only at the bottom.

Not happy about this change at all.

[alexsel]

This will bode well for companies with strong brand value.