New text ad format?

[wobwobs]

Greetings from the publishing side! I run a few websites and recently noticed a new type of text ad being served. Some of them include a logo and they all seem to include a rounded call-to-action button ("OPEN"). Previously, these new text ads were mixed in with the regular text ads but now they've completely taken over. Unfortunately, the performance on these new text ads has been terrible for us.

I'm trying to get a better understanding of what's going on so I thought I'd ask you folks if you're familiar with these new text ads or if they're being automatically generated by Google Ads.

[llos]

Hey there! I just cracked the code on this from the advertiser side. Google changed how their responsive ads worked recently, and in addition to uploading an image to use in your ads, you can also now upload a small logo image which is optional.

If you don't upload a logo, you'll serve the traditional text ads with arrow buttons (AKA nessie arrows) that you're used to seeing, but if you upload a logo all of those regular text ads get switched into the ones that have the OPEN call to action button, with your logo displayed alongside of it.

It's an extremely dumb decision, in my opinion, to make this change without letting the advertiser know what's going on, since you'd think Google would auto-optimize for the best performing ads. I know they like to run experiments, but this one just ain't working, for either side of the fence it seems.

[not2easy]

Hi llos and Welcome to WebmasterWorld [webmasterworld.com]

I have seen many people here - mostly the AdSense publishers wondering about that "Open" button seen on ads and puzzled about the purpose. Thank you for sharing that information. Yes, surprising that publishers don't get a heads-up when these changes show up.

[llos]

Thank you for the warm welcome! And yes, as someone who's been on the publisher side as well, trying to figure out why revenues are dropping can be extremely frustrating without being provided any info.

Moreover, this small change killed a bunch of my top performing Google Ads campaigns, and removing the logo image put them back into the review process, which is just lovely.