Longer AdWords Copy Rollout Continues

Invites have gone out to AdWords advertisers asking them to create longer ad copy. The copy lengths are 110, 140, and 200 characters. Here's a snippet taken from email sent to selected Google AdWords account holders:

Over the past several months, we have given a small number of advertisers the ability to run ads with longer descriptions (longer ad text) -- up to 200 characters long -- on the Google Network. We have received great results from users and advertisers on this new feature and we would like to invite you to participate in the next phase of this test. Not only will you help us test a new feature, but you could also gain higher conversion rates with your longer ads.

We will begin testing in October and may continue testing over the next few months. We will let you know when the test ends.

We will alternate showing your regular ad text with the longer versions of the text. We plan to experiment with slight layout variations of the longer ads in order to determine which layout design and ad text length will perform the best.

So GOOG are giving more real estate to AdWords because it increases clickthrough rate for advertisers (not to mention makes them squillions of $$$). With larger AdWords blocks and Froogle results now showing for lots of product based searches how long untill natural listings are below the fold?

IMHO natural listings will cease to be enough. If you are marketing product online now is the time to make sure that you have an optimised Froogle feed and a finely tuned AdWords account. Natural listings from GOOG may soon not drive enough traffic as GOOG makes the transition from Search Engine to "AdverEngine".