Bing Ads (the new moniker for Microsoft Advertising) is testing an ad format that should be very familiar — they’re combining the first two lines of text on search ads to make a much longer headline.

The US market test is currently running on a small percentage of searches on Bing and will be rolling out to Yahoo Search, as well. It will be seen on the first three ads appearing at the top of the page. The goal, says Microsoft, is to improve click-through rates.

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New Appearance

The reason this format may look familiar is that Google has been using a similar treatment on some ads (adding URLs to headlines and extending headlines) since early last year.

If the first sentence of the descriptive copy ends with a period, a question mark, or an exclamation point, it will be added to the headline with a hyphen as a separator. If that first descriptive line is too long, the display URL will be added instead, excluding any www or URL extensions, and with a “|” separator. When those elements are “promoted” to the first line, they are omitted later in the ad.

Related Topics: Channel: SEM | Microsoft: Bing | Microsoft: Bing Ads

About The Author: Pamela Parker is a contributing editor for Search Engine Land and Executive Features Editor at Marketing Land. She’s a well-respected authority on digital marketing, having reported and written on the subject since 1998, including a stint as managing editor of ClickZ. She’s also worked to help monetize independent publishers’ sites at Federated Media Publishing. She blogs about media and marketing at The River and about cooking, gardening and parenthood at Free Range. She can be found on Twitter as @pamelaparker. See more articles by Pamela Parker

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