Google Displays URL in Title (Along With First Line of Ad Text)
Maybe you saw this interesting new Google feature last week? Google is starting to show the display URL within the headline for select ads on Google.com. I think it is pretty neat and I am excited to see how this affects click-through rates. This change comes a few months after Google increased the headline length for select Google ads.![]()
Straight from Google:When shown in the headline, the display URL will be separated from the rest of the text by a vertical bar and will include only the domain, not the “www.” prefix or any subdirectories. Your display URL will also continue to appear as normal below the description line. Of course, if the headline already contains your domain, we won’t display it again.
My favorite go to search term for new adwords tweaks (and tasty loose leaf teas)- Teavana does not have the URL insertion when a user searches for brand name teavana
But alas, after a few more searches my favorite Teavana did not let me down! But pay close attention to the new ad below – it doesn’t make much sense. Google has taken what used to be the headline and first line of ad text and squished them into one line and now with the addition of the brand URL – the ‘sentence’ (that was supposed to be the second and third lines of text) no longer flows or makes much sense.
With this latest Google tweak (and really always) I think we should be careful when working on our clients accounts to ensure this type of issue doesn’t happen. While Teavana is not a client of my agency – I’m sure this was just a minor oversight that their team will soon fix.
I’ll be interested in the overall outcome of Google inserting the Display URL within the title. In addition, I will be paying close attention to our clients metrics. Also, in case you were wondering -after some dutiful counting I believe the reason teavana.com did not appear in the headline for the first example is because of the fact that the headline would have come out to 69 characters with the addition of the URL and the second query allows the headline to come in well under the Google requirement of 68 characters or less.
