Google's Latest Ad Format Update

Google recently announced a change to its standard ad unit. This marks the third significant change affecting marketers of prescription products in the past year who are using Google.

At this point, I'm definitely seeing the need to revisit my article on using Google to market prescription products and even the presentation from last fall's FDLI Advertising and Promotion conference is now out of date. Over the next few months, I will be providing more on that.

In the meantime, here's the skinny on the update.

Google is fully embracing a mobile-first world view and is expanding the character count limitations for text ads.

The chart below (lifted from Google's public blog post) shows the breakdown between the current and the new formats.

For the ad copy, an additional 35 characters will be available for the headline, and an additional 10 characters will be available for the description. As pointed out by Convergence Point Media, in practice, this might expand the total characters available in a description even more than 10 characters because the description will no longer be treated as two separate 35-characters fields. That might mean that marketers are able to avoid the waste that sometimes is entailed in the current two-line description.

The primary benefit for marketers of prescription products is that it will be easier to meet their requirements for promoting drugs without a black box via a reminder ad and for black box drugs to fit all of the required elements for a reminder-like ad. This is most particularly relevant to fixed dose combination products. When the product being promoted has four or five active ingredients, it can very quickly be difficult to fix everything into the current character count limitations. Yet, failure to use the full established name remains on FDA's radar both in guidance and enforcement as a key regulatory requirement.

In addition to this expansion of the character counts, the display URL will be treated differently. Currently, marketers are able to manually enter a distinct display URL for their ads. In the new ad format, the display URL will be "automatically extracted" from the destination URL, with some (but only minimal) ability to customize the display URL seen by users.

This change has far greater implications for prescription product marketers, as it is precisely the ability to have a difference between the destination and the display URL that enables marketers to make use of redirecting ads.

If the ads automatically extract the base URL from the destination URL, then the mismatch between display and destination URL that is essential to redirecting ads will no longer be possible. This would significantly limit prescription product marketers' options. 

The biggest concern is for smaller, less well known brands. For those brands a reminder ad is not viable because very few people are already aware of their brand name; hence a reminder ad that doesn't describe the product's use has no value. But if the redirecting ads are eliminated, then such lesser known brands would have no way of attracting people who are looking for treatments. By assumption, these brands are not as well known which also means that their organic listings are not likely to be very high, so this would have a deeply chilling effect on the information available to people using Google. In essence, Google paid search would no longer be a viable means for building brands, but only for maintaining brands built on other platforms.

At the moment, Google has not provided any information about when this update will move beyond its initial testing to be available for everyone, or when it will be mandatory that ads adopt this new format. For now, this is simply something that marketers and regulatory professionals will need to stay abreast of.

It is also important to note that Google isn't synonymous with search, though it is the largest platform by a significant margin. Yahoo! and Bing remain very large players in this arena, and there's no reason to assume that Yahoo! and Bing will automatically adopt Google's changes. As a practical matter, this will probably mean having multiple sets of paid search campaigns going through the review and approval process.