by Diana Adams
In my last post I identified where paid ads display on the different search networks. This time I thought I’d create a brief outline of what the ads themselves actually look like, and explain some of the basic ‘rules’ associated with each search network.
Basically, all ads include three parts that you see, and one that you don’t. The parts that we see displayed include Headline, one or two Description lines, and a Display URL. The part that we don’t actually see is the Destination URL, which is not identical to the Display URL. It determines which page the searcher will land on when they click the ad (referred to as the landing page).
Simple enough? Well, yes, and no. There are rules that are applied to each of the ad lines, rules that control precisely just how many characters you have to work with. And the rules vary (although only slightly) across the different search networks. There’s another blog post I’ll have to put together to help you with writing the ad text. Also, the ‘rules’ I’m going to outline here are true on the search network. The content ads you see on other websites, may or may not follow these rules. Again, that’s another post, but for this post I’m going to keep it as simple as I can.
The appearance of the ads will vary, depending on the location of the ad. The ads in the top three positions (those above the natural results) will appear in two lines with a Headline, above the Display URL and a single Description line:
Ads to the right of the natural results will appear with the Headline above two Description lines, which are above the Display URL:
Google gives you twenty-five (that’s 25) characters to work with, including spaces, for the Headline. They give you 70 characters to work with for the Description, and 35 to work with for the Display URL. The Description gets tricky with Google because the Description is broken into two separate lines, limited to 35 characters each. So looking at the ad from www.mountaingear.com in the example above, the description line has 64 characters, but they have to be broken into two lines. Were the ad to be on the right side of the natural results, it would display like this:
Rock Climbing Shoes [19 characters]
Find great gear for mountain and [32 characters]
rock climbing at Mountain Gear! [31 characters]
www.mountaingear.com [25 characters]
Yahoo
Again, as with Google, the appearance of the ad will vary depending on placement. The top three ads will display in three lines with the Headline above the Description, and the Display URL on a third line. (notice how the Display URL doesn’t appear on the 2nd line, before the Description as it does in Google. But there is a difference beyond this one, and I’ll discuss that in a little bit):
Ads to the right of the natural results will display just like they do on Google, with the Headline above two Description lines, which are above the Display URL:
Now for the bigger difference between Yahoo and Google. Yahoo’s Headline gives you 40 characters to work with. The Headline in the REI ad reads “Rock Climbing Shoes at REI” - and that’s 26 characters. Not so impressive at this point, but you could find a Headline that says “Buy Climbing Rock Shoes Today” which is 29, or even “Rock Climbing Shoes: Ships Free Next Day” which is 40 characters. Another difference is that Yahoo doesn’t split the Description into two lines. You get 70 characters total, and they split the lines at natural line breaks for the ads on the right side of the page. At times their automatic line break can look unbalanced, but that is just something we don’t have control over.
MSN
Microsoft adCenter follows pretty much the identical rules that Google wrote, same number of characters, Description line split into two lines etc, so I won’t go in and do any further explanation on that one. However, the ads at the top display differently than on both Google and Yahoo. You’ll find the Headline at the top, with the Display URL just to the right on the same line, with the two Description lines just below:
Ads that display on the right hand side look identical to, and follow identical rules as at Google:
Conclusion
So there you have it, a basic description of the ‘rules’ and screen shots of what the ads look like on the different search networks. The basic thing to remember is all ads have 3 visible components, Headline, Description and Display URL, and the invisible component, a Destination URL which determines the landing page. How many characters each network allows is varied, but only slightly, and it’s really not a big deal to figure out the differences.
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