Expanded Text Ads

Expanded text ads were Google's standard Search ad for years. Each had up to three headlines of 30 characters each, with the first two required and the third optional, shown separated by vertical pipes. They also had two descriptions of up to 90 characters each, plus an optional display path with two fields of up to 15 characters. You wrote every line and decided exactly what combination people saw. In Google Ads Help the format is described in the past tense: you can no longer create or edit it, and the page tells advertisers to move to responsive search ads. In practice the format was easy to reason about: what you typed was what appeared, which made it simple to test one change at a time.

The cutoff was June 30, 2022. From that date, Google stopped letting advertisers create or edit expanded text ads. Ads that already existed kept running, and you can still pause, resume, or remove them and view their reports. That means an old account may still contain live expanded text ads, frozen exactly as they were written. If you want to change a word, you cannot. You have to build a replacement. Google also suggests responsive ads for Display Network campaigns, though that is a separate format with its own rules. Reports for these ads remain, so you can mine the old data to find which phrases earned the best click rate and reuse them as RSA assets.

The replacement behaves differently, and that is the main adjustment. A responsive search ad takes up to 15 headlines and 4 descriptions, and a minimum of 3 headlines and 2 descriptions is needed to save it. Google then assembles combinations for each search. You can pin a message to a position, but Google advises against pinning in most cases because it reduces the combinations that can be tested and can lower Ad Strength. The rules for characters carry over: 30 for headlines, 90 for descriptions, and 15 per path field. Google adds that the replacement also fits Display Network campaigns, where responsive ads show as several formats, so the same habit of supplying varied assets pays off there.

The mistakes worth avoiding are mostly about habits formed under the old format. Copying three old headlines and two descriptions into an RSA and pinning each in place recreates the old ad without its control or its testing. Another is leaving the frozen expanded text ads running alongside an RSA in the same ad group, which splits impressions in ways that make results hard to compare. And some owners keep old ad copy that was written for line-by-line control and reads badly when lines appear in new orders. Old policies sometimes linger too: if a line in an old ad breaks a current policy, that is one more reason to rebuild rather than patch.

What to do this week is simple. Filter your ad report for expanded text ads and note which ones still get impressions. For each ad group, write an RSA using the best old headlines as raw material but adding distinct angles: price, location, speed, proof, and offer. Aim for Good or Excellent Ad Strength, and run at least two RSAs per ad group with different final URLs if you have them, as Google recommends. Once the RSA has enough data, pause the old text ad. Plan the cutover ad group by ad group, starting with the one that spends the most, so any dip in results is easy to spot and explain.