Were you working on your business or with a customer yesterday at between 12 and 1 yesterday afternoon? Well you are not alone.

Despite being small business friendly, Google’s Adwords feature presentation probably wasn’t a huge priority for many service professionals yesterday. And nor should it, much of the time was dedicated to features that service based business will never need.

Luckily we were able to catch most of the presentation and are excited about a few new things that Google is working on. While none of it is has been released live just yet, most of it is slated to be released in the next 6 to 12 months.

Other than having a lot to say about a new interface, the main items are targeted toward mobile search.

A few of the items that we are excited about local service companies:

Longer Headlines

If you were lucky you might have been invited to be in a closed beta to test longer headlines for your ads. This is a direct result of the removal of the side ads in desktop search as now there is room on the right-hand side for larger ads. However, it is now going to be released to everyone.

The changes include:

• Two 30 character headlines, up from one 25 character headline
• One consolidated 80 character description Line, up from two 35 character description lines

What does this mean? According to Google, the longer headlines have seen 20% lift in CTR. However, my guess is this lift is when shown against ads with shorter headlines.

While there will be an increase in CTR, we are not sure just how much. We will see what happens to CTR’s once everyone has them later this year.

Back to Device Bidding

Finally, Google is bringing back to being able to target separate device types. If you recall a few years ago, Adwords made the change to “enhanced campaigns” which removed the ability to target devices at the campaign level.

Now that they forced everyone to bid more on mobile, they are reverting the changes back so that advertisers have more control.

According to Google:

In the next few months, you’ll be able to set individual bid adjustments for each device type — mobile, desktop and tablet. This lets you anchor your base keyword bid to the device most valuable to your business and then set bid adjustments for each of the other devices. You will also have a wider range to adjust bids, up to +900%. With more controls, you can now optimize with greater precision while keeping things simple with a single campaign that reaches consumers across devices.

What does this mean? Well, you now will be able to segment traffic in your campaigns much easier so that you can focus on the type of traffic that bring you qualified leads. Instead of wasting money on poor quality traffic you will have more control of where your money is being spent.

Local Search Ads In Maps

This is something that we had a feeling was coming to local search. As more and more searches with local intent occur and along with Google’s focus on local listings, ads in Google Maps and the local stack will become common place.

According to the keynote, there will be a few options for advertisers.

• Promoted Pins – not something that we see being relevant to service-based companies at this time
• Local Search Ads – this is something we reported on a few weeks ago
• Highlighted Specials and Deals – great for offering promotions and coupons for services

What does this mean? If you do not have location extensions turned on we suggest that you do so now. Ads are now displaying for some companies and this can be a great way to get more clicks now and potentially even more in the future.

We are excited for all of these features to be released, but we will have to be patient. As features get released will we let you know! If you have any questions feel free to reach out to us.