If you are used to change the Display URL on your AdWords ad variations to get the attention of people searching for a specific term, you might be interested to know that the AdWords team has decided to display the domain portion of the Display URL in lowercase for any ad variation. Therefore, if you have ads where the Display URL contains capital letters, these will be shown all in lowercase.
I’m going to take a well-known example from the AdWords Youtube video: Better ad texts, better performance!
Within this video the recommendation to stand out is to
- Use more popular keywords in your ad text
- Include Special offers or unique selling point
- Include Call to actions, and
- Enter capitalization of the ad text
This is the example of the ad suggested
According to the recent AdWords announcement, such ad would appear as this in the next week or so.
The change will apply also to Display URLs that contain subdomains. For example, if we have Canon.CameraShopSite.com, it will appear as canon.camerashopsite.com
The good news is that the portion corresponding to sub-directories can still be capitalized and use dynamic keyword insertion. For instance, if we have Canon.CameraShopSite.com/Digital-Camera, it will appear as canon.camerashopsite.com/Digital-Camera
Additionally, we don’t have to make any changes in our ad variations to reflect the new change because they will automatically be changed.
The bad news is that if you have don’t have additional information in your Display URL different to the domain (e.g www.site.com) you destination URL will look plain compared to other ads that use additional keywords within the destination URL (e.g www.site.com/Keywordsearched)
Apparently the purpose of this new restriction is to push people to use website testing to test variations of the landing pages and website in general. In order words, use Google Website Optimizer to test and measure success.
My advise, keep an eye on the performance of your ad variations during the next few weeks. If you see a negative impact on your campaigns, create new ad variations keeping in mind the restrictions for capitalization under the destination URL and of course use website optimizer tools to improve the performance of your landing pages.
Apparently the purpose of this new restriction is to push people to use website testing to test variations of the landing pages and website in general. In order words, use Google Website Optimizer to test and measure success.
My advise, keep an eye on the performance of your ad variations during the next few weeks. If you see a negative impact on your campaigns, create new ad variations keeping in mind the restrictions for capitalization under the destination URL and of course use website optimizer tools to improve the performance of your landing pages.
