Articles in The 'Microsoft updates' Tag

Spotted: Longer Bing Ad Formats

by Anne Garcia

Bing Ads, formerly Microsoft adCenter, is testing a new format for its ads which combines the first two lines of text, the headline and description line one, to make one long headline.

Below is a screenshot of two different ads on the search engine results page of Bing. The first ad is the standard format that has the headline and URL shown on the first line. The second ad showcases the new format that includes the ad headline and first description line.

This new ad format is being tested on Bing and will be rolled out to Yahoo shortly. The extended ad will appear when an ad is in the top three ad positions on the search engine results page. Microsoft says that the goal of the new ad format is to improve click through rates for advertisers. Microsoft has been testing new ad formats since this summer, when we previously spotted Product Listing Ads (PLA) and ads with seller reviews.

This extended ad format has been available in Google AdWords for quite some time now. Google says that when the first description line ends with a period, question mark or an exclamation point, it will be added to the first line of the ad with a hyphen as a separator. Below is a screenshot of the extended ad format on Google.