Google recently announced a sunsetting of expanded text ads (ETA’s) at the end of June 2022. Google recommended “To prepare for this change, we recommend that you have at least one responsive search ad in every ad group in your Search campaigns by June 30, 2022”. We disagree with this suggestion. In our experience responsive search ads (RSA’s) significantly underperform expanded text ads.  I’m not the only one. I recently participated in a roundtable discussion with 15 other PPC experts and we all agreed that expanded text ads perform better. One competitor, Liberty Marketing, stated   “In our experience, if everything else remained the same, RSAs would spend 17.71% more than ETAs to achieve the same number of conversions, and would have to spend a whopping 36.37% more to achieve the same number of impressions.”

What is important to keep in mind is that expanded text ads will continue to run after June 2022. You just won’t be able to edit them or create new ones. So why would you risk reducing your conversions and increasing your cost per conversion by creating responsive search ads? Do you remember basic text ads? Those were sunsetted sometime around 2015. We still have clients that run those ads even though they can’t be edited. Our prediction is that expanded text ads will continue to run for a very long time-possibly a decade or more. Here’s why-if Google truly sunsets them and makes them inactive then there would be many many ad groups without any ads at all. This would cause a decrease in revenue for Google. For that reason it’s unlikely to happen anytime soon. So the simple answer to Google’s request that you create responsive search ads in your account is…..do nothing!

 

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