The other day I was running a couple searches on Bing (yes, as an internet marketing professional I regularly use Bing) and came across an ad extension that I haven’t seen before. The search was for “property insurance” and if you look at the #1 – #4 listings there is a line that mentions how each site has been “visited by 10K+/100K+ users in the past month”
Look at how many things are going on here:
Ad 1
- Title (50+ characters)
- Display URL
- Twitter follower count
- Actual ad copy
- New extension
- Callout extension
- Sitelinks (4 extended)
Ad 2
- Title
- Display URL
- Twitter follower count
- Actual ad copy
- New extension
- Sitelinks (6-pack)
Are Ad Copy Tests Being Skewed?
This is a topic I’ve been pondering for some time. The traditional PPC ad has 3 displayed components that an advertiser can dictate; headline, copy (two lines in AdWords) & display URL. Notice that for the above examples, 57% and 50% of the displayed components are being shown at the discretion of Bing. That’s a lot of power.
Obviously the headline is a larger font and bolded, so it carries more importance, but how much validity can be attributed to an ad copy test when so much of what a search user sees is being chosen by the search engine? Am I taking crazy pills?
Update
After tweeting this out to the #PPCChat community, we’ve received some great info. First, it appears this is what BingAds refers to as an annotation (thanks to @Mel66 for that link). Furthermore, Jennifer Slegg has a full post on these bad boys on TheSEMPost here. It seems that you need to qualify, and then a BingAds rep needs to get you approved. Read Jennifer’s post for full details.
