A story of Google attempt at creating Expanded Ads

Flowery language -Good for Clcks - Suspect not for Conversion

[lgn1]

We are jumping rather late into Google Expanded Ads. Our conversions and quality scores have been good, so it has not been a major concern, but Google offered to create some new ads for us, and we were interested in what's Google Design Team would come up with, so we gave it a shot.

Google came back with ads with some quite flowery language, which is the exact opposite I was taught.

I was taught that Google Ads are supposed to be direct to the point, point out your strong selling features, bypassing the superlatives and flowery language.

For curiosity I ran the Google ads, and my CTR almost doubled, however as I suspect, the conversions didn't move much.

Looks like Google is writing ads to increase CTR, which put's more money in their pocket, but it's the conversions that put money in my pocket.

Looks like I will be doing the Expanded ads manually using best practices.

[martinibuster]

Thanks for posting this. I'm looking forward to reading any one else's experience with this.

[RhinoFish]

Our CTRs jumped so much, we began by bidding down -10%, then -15%, at the end, we were bidding down some areas by 60%. We were guessing that perhaps our early roll-outs were beating others, and that over time, we'd have to raise bids higher, but it never came.

We suspect many are still waiting on the sidelines. For one particular client, 10 strong competitors, and we're still the only ones running ETAs. We're thinking Q4 was the wrong time to expect people to revamp all of their creatives. :-) That said, Q4 has been VERY good to us.

I swear it feels like 70% of the competition hasn't rolled out a single ETA ad yet. We don't understand how that can be possible.