Yes, it is true. You can have more than 25 characters in the title of your Google Adwords Ad. I’ve seen it in action.
Being a Philadelphia Search Engine Marketing Agency, we tend to have clients in the Philadelphia area. Clients who want to advertise locally. So, Philadelphia is going to be used as a prefix and suffix for a lot of keywords ’round these parts. Philadelphia is not a short word. 12 characters to be exact.
Sure, we can use Philly and Phila, but they don’t have the same impact. We like to use the full term. So when a client came to us for a piano lesson campaign in Philadelphia, we knew we had our work cut out for us. Why? Because “Philadelphia Piano Lessons” is 26 characters. One over the permitted total. So we can’t use that in our AdWords ad title right?
Wrong. See left…
How is This Allowed?
At first I thought this was a mistake. I counted the characters about 500 times. The total always came back as 26. Then I thought it was a glitch.
It’s not. I’ve seen it quite a few times and one case it was 30!
After some research, it seems Google is aware of the problem (if you want to call it a problem), but in no rush to fix it. Here is why it happens:
Different letters take up different amounts of space. For example, a W is much wider than an I. Therefore, 25 I’s would take up less space that 25 W’s. So if 26 characters can fit into the space of 25 characters, Google will allow this to happen…if you know how to get it to work.
How Can I Do This?
Dynamic ads are dangerous if used improperly, especially with broad keywords. Negative keywords would be very important to a campaign using broad match keywords and dynamic ads. However, if using dynamic ads with exact match keywords, then you may be able to use this strategy to your advantage.
Depending on the width of the search term, this may work for you. Set up a campaign with the exact match keyword that you think will fit. Try a keyword with 26 characters to start. Next, create an ad that has a dynamic title {KeyWord:Philadelphia Piano Lesson}.
I can’t promise it will work. A lot depends on the term and if Google will let you run it the way you want, but definitely experiment and see if you can use this trick to your advantage to improve your click through rate. As you know, you are always one character away from the perfect ad title. Now, maybe you’re not.
June 5, 2011