Just A Little Bit of Character

Ryan Faria - November 12, 2009

For any advertiser who has participated in search engine marketing, part of the difficultly is saying what you want to say within the allotted characters.  The major search engines; Google, Yahoo and MSN (Bing) each allow 70 characters for the description lines (including punctuation and spacing).  What makes Yahoo’s situation unique from Google and MSN is that Yahoo automatically places a period at the end of the ad description; which technically allows 69 characters.  As many search engine marketers know, one character can make a big difference and as a result you will need to completely rewrite ads.

Only recently, Yahoo broke the mold of limiting the amount of characters from 70 to 71.  This one extra character makes a big difference.  In the past many advertisers have had the last letter cut off the end of the ads, which caused the ads to not make sense.  In the case of advertisers who used automated platforms to push campaigns to various search engines, many did not even know that the last letter had been removed and replaced with a period.

One character may not seem like a lot, however in the world of search engine marketing, a little goes a long way.  This may be the perfect opportunity to revamp your Yahoo ads or to start running on Yahoo, if you are not already doing so.