In an official blogpost Bing Ads has announced that it will stop extending support creating new and editing existing STAs on July 31st, 2017. The ads will keep on running but advertisers will not be able to edit them. In March Bing Ads Editor was updated to change Standard Text Ads (STA) to Expanded Text Ads(EXTA).

After July 31st, advertisers will only be able to create EXTA’s. Bing Ads has not made any announcement about when STA’s will stop serving but a considerably advance notice will be given when a decision is taken.

Bing Ads has further shared some best practices to create EXTA’s:

  • Create EXTAs within existing campaigns and ad groups along current STAs
    • Use Standard Text Ads as a baseline to measure how well Expanded Text Ads are performing
    • Create a 1:1 ratio of EXTA to STA ads in each ad group to maximize EXTA impressions
      • Helps avoid impression and click loss while testing EXTAs
      • Assures that EXTAs inherit all ad extensions and other set ups from the existing STAs
    • Once you are confident in the Expanded Text Ads performance, customers can move to 100% adoption, and delete their STAs
  • Take full advantage of the additional character limits
    • Use your best performing STA copy as a starting point when creating EXTAs
    • Experiment with messaging (try different length combinations)
    • Remember that headlines are important. Longer headlines help increase the visual space of text ads and help communicate additional information to searchers
    • Think about using content such as domain, display, description, query in ad title 2

In addition, here are tips for optimizing your EXTAs:

  • Review your ad extensions to ensure that they have fresh, differentiated content from your expanded headlines
  • Add your brand in the headline for trust
  • The clearer and more specific your offering, the better. For example, rather than “big discounts,” specify an exact percentage, such as “50% off.”

 

Author

Ritu from PageTraffic is a qualified Google Ads Professional and Content Head at PageTraffic. She has been the spear head for many successful Search Marketing Campaigns and currently oversees Content Marketing operations of PageTraffic in India.