Good morning Search Marketer, are ETAs taking a back seat?
Several community members reported to us Friday that the option to create a Text ad was no longer available from the Ads dropdown in the Google Ads interface. That leaves Responsive search ad (RSA) and Call ad as the two ad options available in affected accounts. However, text ads aren't totally unavailable — there is still an option to click a link to "Switch back to text ads" from the RSA workflow screen.
I haven't been able to replicate this experience and still see the Text ad option in accounts. We have reached out to Google to find out whether it's a bug, a test or something that's rolling out. It's an odd time — mid-pandemic, pre-holiday — for this type of interface change.
That said, the eventual demise of ETAs has seemed a foregone conclusion. Whether this is a nail in the ETA coffin remains to be seen, but RSAs represent where Google is moving with machine learning. In this case, ML is used to predict which combinations of titles and descriptions will resonate best with a searcher based on historical data and signals available at the time of the auction.
If Google is getting closer this shift, it's going to be a big wake up for a lot of advertisers that haven't embraced testing RSAs. Even if this turns out to be a bug, we should probably still take it as a hint of what's to come at some point. An RSA tip: "To truly have success with RSAs — or any text ad format," Brad Geddes told an SMX audience last year, "advertisers need to put thought into their ads and get back to basics of messaging benefits versus features."
Ginny Marvin
Editor-In-Chief
