I found this strange AdWords result this morning on my wife’s computer from a query she made. I made her stop working and took over her computer. I did a similar query for a different state and got the same result. (Same ad, same company but different state.) As you can see, the top ad has twice as many lines of text as normally allowed.
I emailed a screen capture to the folks at Search Engine Roundtable to see what they thought about it. It was then picked up by Danny Sullivan at the Search Engine Watch Blog, and a few days later by ClickZ News. No one on the mainland was able to reproduce the result so I’m sure there was a bit of skepticism. (I couldn’t believe my eyes either.) It was later confirmed by a Google spokesman that they are conducting a “limited test” with larger ad formats.
Ironically… Yahoo! Just shortened their ads from 190 to 70 characters to making them more like Google just the other day on January 18th. The reaction was, this is not a good idea. It’s way too big. If both ads had four lines of text it would push the natural results almost off the page and it’s ugly. The only benefit this ad format could have (IMO) is possibly for the AdSence advertisers. It’s a nice block of copy that might work well inserted into an editorial article. One of the new features of AdSence is you can select the relevant copy on your page that you would like to trigger an AdSence unit. (Thanks to JenSence.com, You can download a tutorial here) This might allow the advertiser to create a more compelling ad that allows for better qualification of the click and the publisher to present the most relevant ad to the audience. Another interesting fact is that I can only reproduce the result on my wife’s computer. I have a personalized Google home page etc on my computer and at work. This leads me to believe that Google has some extra AdWords targeting options they don’t make publicly available.
Aloha,
Dave.