Spice Up Your Google AdWords Ads With ASCII Art

Jan 10, 2008 at 9:07am ET by Barry Schwartz

The BannerBlog wrote that they wanted their German car rental client, Sixt, to stand out in the sponsored listings for a search on “Mietwagen” (car rental) in Google. They came up with the idea to display ASCII art of cars in the ad spot.

I tried to duplicate the results with Google’s AdWords Preview Tool, but even with setting the tool to German, I was unable to see it. I suspect Google did not like the use of ASCII in the ad and removed that ad from the results.

Sixt was not the first to try ASCII art in Google ads. There is a WebmasterWorld thread from 2002 where advertisers discuss how they have been experimenting with ASCII art in their ads. Some said that Google has removed their ASCII ads shortly after them going live, due to content issues.

Hat tip to Mind Valley Labs for bringing this to my attention!

Postscript: I spotted this Flickr image which demonstrates how you can use the Google AdWords console to fake examples of what is shown above.

Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here.

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