Ascii Text Ads on AdWords

As users suffered from banner ad blindness earlier this decade, a number of new surveys suggest the same trend is happening with Paid Text ads. While I have not seen data to suggest any reason to panic it does lend support for a vigilant “Test & Learn” credo.

While doing some research I found a great example of a company in Germany that tested the use of Ascii in there text ads. While I’m a tad bit suspect of this story being 100% as Ascii would not be allowed by the “too much punctuation” filter in AdWords, it is a good example of the overall idea of “testing and Learning” from your own and competitors Ad Text. As a Online Marketer and user nothing is worse than seeing the same offer repeated 10 times on the right side of a search results page.

The company sixt.de is located in Germany and that could be the reason for the exception.

Sixt.de is a car rental company as such the Ascii art depicts two types of cars. As the ads stood out from the crowd of Text ads the company claimed they had a 47% increase in there campaigns click-through rate. I’d be very interested to see how many of those users based on this ad took an action (quote request, email sign-up…), as I’d suspect with such unique Text ad’s they likely garnered a high level of Looky Lou’s. If “Brand Awareness” by impressions and clicks was there success metric I’d be certain they hit the mark with this campaign.