The news appeared on Microsoft Ads official blog post on October 5 that Microsoft Ads will follow suit their counterpart Google, to officially sunset ETAs (Expanded Text Ads) by June 2022.
Microsoft follows Google’s decision to sunset ETA
Microsoft seems to be doing this update can be congruent with Google as well. As most advertisers import their Google Ads over to Microsoft to boost their search visibility.
Quote by Microsoft, “We also have an announcement related to future plans with Responsive Search Ads. Over time, we’ve found that the more advertisers we have in the marketplace using RSAs, the better for both advertiser performance and improving the intelligence of our machine learning models. To help elevate advertisers’ ROI with the power of our automation and create a simplified cross-platform experience, we’ve decided to align to Google’s newly announced changes: Starting June 30, 2022, RSAs will be the only search ad type that can be created or edited in standard search campaigns. Existing expanded text ads will still serve, but they won’t be able to be edited or added.”
Why is this important?
Text ads have been with us since the dawn of Google Ads back in 2001. Expanded Text Ads was released in 2016 as an addition to allow advertisers to use 2x 30 characters for headlines and 1x 80 characters for descriptions and later updated again to include 3 x 30 characters headlines and 2 x 90 characters descriptions. Text ads have been used from the start to control our messaging to reach other users. Basically, we type out the ad and the customer sees exactly that.
Responsive Search Ads are fairly new. It has only been introduced back in October 2019. In almost exactly 2 years since its release, Google is confident of it being not just to replace ETAs, but to become the default and only option when creating search ads.
Google and Microsoft’s decisions to sunset ETA is a big move in the advertising world. This means the ability to control our messaging has been hindered in the light of machine learning and data-driven advertising becoming more and more prevalent.
Is this good? We believe so. Heraclitus once said, “Change is the only constant.”. This is especially true in the world of internet advertising.
Whatever that can help us achieve better results will typically be done.
