Adalysis Now Supports ETAs (Expanded Text Ads)

By Brad

1 comments

Ads

Adalysis now has support for expanded text ads (ETAs).

This is a large change to both ads in your account and how Adalysis calculates the ad test data so please take a moment to understand the changes.

How ETAs are Tested

ETAs can run on any device and don’t carry a mobile preferred flag. This means that ETAs compete against:

  • Other ETAs
  • Mobile preferred ads
  • Desktop (non-mobile preferred) ads

In order to test ETAs against all ad types and let users see all of their ad data at once, we removed the notion of ‘effective device’. That means you can test ETAs against ETAs, mobile preferred, or desktop ads.

However, this also means that there will be some false positives before the final removal of text ads.

For instance, Adalysis automatically detects where you have two ads running and automatically starts a test for you so you don’t have to do any manual work.

If you have one mobile preferred ad and one desktop ad; technically, they don’t compete. However, as there are two active ads in the ad group; we will start a test even though there’s nothing for you to do. In these cases, you should add an ETA to the ad group so you can see how the ETA does against each ad format.

Manual Testing

Now, we know that some of you are going to make mobile only campaigns with the changes to bid modifiers and that you only want to see certain ad types in a test result.

To accommodate this type of testing, we have changed how ‘manual testing’ work.

  • You can choose to only test certain ad formats
  • We’ve included ‘common date range’ as a feature of manual tests.

If you navigate to single ad group tests > manual tests, you can see the new features:

image

Mapping Ad Formats

We have two features that require standard text and new expanded text ads to be mapped against each other. These are the rules we’re using (customization of your own rules for upgrading ads will be possible in a future tool release):

Standard Text Ads ETAs Considerations
Headline Headline 1 New headline is 5 more characters (25 vs 30)
Description line 1 Headline 2 New headline2 is 5 less characters (35 vs 30)
Description line 2 Description New description line is 45 more characters (35 vs 80)
Final URL Final URL
Display URL Display URL with Paths This is rather complicated; but if you are using subdomains for display URLs that are not subdomains of final URLS, we’ll use it as path1. If you are using a folder (example.com/keyword), we’ll map keyword to path1, etc.

Multi-Ad Group Testing Changes

In order to test patterns across both ad formats, you’ll now see which patterns by ad type will be included in a test:

image

This will let you test how a pattern in the standard ad formats will do in the new ad formats. We’re seeing users wanting to test:

  • Standard text ad
  • ETA with standard text d1 as new h2
  • ETA with standard text d2 as new h2

In order to be able to compare the standard text description line 1 against the new headline 2; we’ve mapped these ad lines together.

If you only want to test ETAs versus other ETAs in your patterns, then you can choose specific ‘ad types’ to be included in your multi-ad group tests and only test standard text ads, ETAs, or other ad formats:

image

Upgrade Tools

Many users want an easy way to upgrade from the standard ad format to the new ad format; so you can upgrade a single ad or multiples at a time.

Upgrading a Single Ad

At the moment, if you go to the edit functionality of an ad, you’ll have the option to ‘upgrade to ETA’ where we’ll map the new lines to the standard text ad ones and show any problems (such as character limits) before you save the ad into the new format.

image

Upgrading Multiple Ads

From the ads tab you can upgrade multiple ads to ETAs.

If you only want to upgrade some ads, you can first filter your ads and only select the filtered ads. Once you’ve selected ads, click on the ‘ETA Upgrade Tool’ and you will be presented with several options:

UpgradeTool

With this tool, you can choose what text you want to use in the upgraded ad formats from your standard text ads or create new lines.

For instance, you could copy line 2 of your existing ads to the headline 2 of the new ads and then write a common description line to be used among the selected ads. Since ETAs have different character limits, when upgrading multiple ads at once and inheriting your standard text ad data, you will also want to write a second line (in the blank spaces) as to what happens if your lines exceed the new character limits.

It’s suggested that you use the ‘preview ads’ button before creating the new ads to ensure you are happy with your new ad creation.

When you use the tool, you can either create new ETAs and leave your standard text ads running to test them against each other, or easily pause your standard text ads at the time of creation.

New ETA Upgrade Tools Coming Soon

We’re working on a much more robust tool which will let you filter and then upgrade multiple ads and variations in bulk. As this is a fairly complex tools with a lot of functionality built into it, it’s not ready to be released yet, but should be soon.

We’ll notify everyone when the new tool is ready.

Ad Testing Ideas for ETAs

If you need ideas on how to test ETAs, please see this article.

Related Post

One Comment

  • Matthew

    Can Adalysis support ETA’s for the Bing & Gemini Platforms as well?

    Reply

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