Guide To Different Search Ad Types

If you’re new to Google Ads it can be hard to understand the different types of search ad types that are available to use. Especially when all three types result in how they’re displayed in Google and a searcher will struggle to tell which type is being used.

In this blog post we’ve looked at the three different types of search ads, why they’re useful and their drawbacks.

Expanded Ads

Expanded ads are the basic ad type for search campaigns. You set the different parameters and what you submit is what’s shown. Expanded Ads allow for 3 headlines and 2 description lines (Opposed to the older search ads which only allowed 2 headlines and 1 description but is no longer available).

Advantages Of Expanded Ads

  • Gives you full control over what your ads look like.
  • Easier to analyse to make changes to ads based on the performance.

Disadvantages Of Expanded Ads

  • Can be harder to manage as multiple ad variants need to be set up for testing.
  • Limits how much Google’s machine learning can be used to make the ad more relevant to the searcher.

Responsive Ads

Responsive Ads allow you to give Google a number of different options for both headlines and descriptions and they will choose which they think will be most attractive to the searcher based on what they’ve searched. To give you more control over certain parts of the ad you can fix certain elements to relative positions.

Advantages Of Responsive Ads

  • Takes advantage of Google machine learning in order to improve click through rates.
  • Can result in higher quality scores, meaning lower cost per clicks.

Disadvantages Of Responsive Ads

Less control over your ad copy. Some of your ads may not make sense depending on the different headlines you add.
Can be harder to determine exactly which variants are working the best and to see if you need to make any changes based on those.

Dynamic Ads

Dynamic ads give you the least control over what’s being displayed and what searches it’s being displayed for. You simply enter which web page you want to advertise, enter a few restrictions and Google takes care of the rest, pulling all the information they need from the web page.

Advantages Of Dynamic Ads

  • Quick and easy to set up.
  • Can gain additional traffic which may otherwise be missed (could be seen as a disadvantage.

Disadvantages Of Dynamic Ads

  • Least control over your ads and where they’re displayed.
  • Can’t conduct tests in order to improve performance.