Adwords Ads Shows 5 Lines of Text
This morning I noticed that Google Adwords ads are showing 5 lines of text in some cases instead of typical 4 line Adwords ads. The 5th line would mention a geographic area.
This practice was introduced by Google for a short period in 2006 but then it went off before even all advertisers would notice it. It seems Google might be thinking to get it back. This old thread at WMW discusses some of the reasons for such 5 th geographic lines in ads.
A search in Google for “Share tip” showed this ad.
If google is trying to bring in more geographical relevance to its search ads, that is definitely a good effort but I think there is some major update needed to this. At this point , it looks pretty funny because..
a) “Share Tip” as a keyword is not geo specific. It might have some relevance to the way share trading is done in a country but it is definitely not regional enough to have the mention of a state name( or a union territory, as in this case) So a mention of “Andaman and Nicobar Islands doesn’t make much sense.
b) Also, it was initially thought that if an ad has been targeted to a specific geography, visitors searching from that region would get to see the 5th line – however, in this case the search was being conducted from Hyderabad and the 5th line showed “Andaman and Nicobar Island”.
What’s up Google ?
Regional Targeting is an old feature. Read more here: http://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=13847&topic=14691