Ep 51: Preparing for the End of Expanded Text Ads

Apr 14, 2022

Text ads and Google Ads are going away soon. Here's what you need to do to get ready.

Hey everybody, Jim Lastinger here. Welcome to another episode of Marketing In 10. So by now, I'm sure you've heard the news that text ads are going away this summer. This is kind of a big deal, because text ads and various newer versions of text ads are the original type of ads that you saw on Google Ads.

For a long time, when you thought about what a Google Ad looked like, it was a text ad. Starting on June 30th of this year, 2022, you won't be able to create any new expanded text ads, which is the latest variation of text ads. But all of your existing ads will still be valid and you can still run those. You can pause them, see all the data, all that stuff is still going to be there going forward. The only thing is you won't be able to create any new expanded text ads as of that date.

So you need to be ready for this transition, and I have several accounts where the oldest version of text ads, the ones with just one or two headlines and the shorter character requirements are still the best performing ad variations that we have. So I expect to see some of those things still happen here as well.

If you have great performing expanded text ads, then those will give you an advantage over the average performing responsive search ads that you'll see in the future. It's important that we go ahead and have all of the different options available to us that we can as far as different ad copy and as many different expanded text ad variations as we can get.

So that's the very first thing you need to do. I want you to create a bunch of new expanded text ads. If you have some ad copy that you want to test out, then now is the time to go ahead and get those ads created so that you'll have time to test it. I would put extra time toward creating way more text ads than you normally would because you won't be able to do that before too long.

Having the text ads in your account will allow you to run them through your normal testing process to see how they're performing compared to each other. You don't have to test them all right now, but you have to go ahead and get those created and think a little bit ahead so that you can test them in the coming months.

So far, I've found it much easier to test new ad copy on expanded text ads than with the newer responsive search ads, so try to keep your testing there. With expanded text ads, you can be more sure of exactly what your ads are showing than you can be with responsive ads. So take advantage of that while you can.

Other than creating a bunch of new expanded text ads, it's time to start moving toward responsive search ads anyway. These are clearly the future so you might as well go ahead and start adding them into your accounts.

Responsive ads tend to convert pretty well so far, and they're the heart of the newer, more automated campaigns like Performance Max, and I'll do another episode pretty soon on Performance Max campaign so I'm not going to do it a deep dive on that right now. But I definitely want you to get in there and try out some new responsive search ads in your existing campaigns.

The big benefits of responsive search ads is that they can simplify your account quite a bit by optimizing a bunch of different ad copy all at the same time. In a responsive ad, you get to interrupt at 10 different headlines and a bunch of different descriptions.

Then Google Ads, the algorithm runs various combinations together and figures out what the optimum combinations are for each individual user. It's a really great concept, but we don't really get a whole lot of insight into how it actually is working. All we can see are the end result numbers.

Like I said before, so far, I'm seeing pretty decent performance from responsive ads. They've definitely improved over time and now I'm including them in every account going forward. My current suggestion is for every ad group to have two to three different expanded text ads and one responsive ad, depending on the amount of volume that you run through that ad group.

All right. Well, there you have it. That's what want to see you doing with expanded text ads in the next couple of months. That transition again is coming on June 30th. First, I want you to create a bunch of new expanded text ads between now and then, so you can have them in your account and ready to use before the cutoff. Then you can run them through your normal ad testing process.

And second, go ahead and start adding responsive search ads throughout your accounts. I'll have show notes and a transcript for this episode available at jimlastinger.com/51, and if you would please take two minutes to rate and review the show so that I can recur the podcast and help more people just like you.

As a thank you for listening, I've created a free guide that shows you exactly how to manage your Google accounts in just 30 minutes a week. This is the exact process that I teach all of my coaching clients and includes everything you need to run a successful and profitable ad account. You can download it for free at jimlastinger.com/guide. That's jimlastinger.com/guide, and I'll also have a link to this in the show notes.

That's it for this week's episode. I'll be back soon with another episode of Marketing In 10. Until then, take care and have a great day.

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