• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, June 7, 2016

Bing Ads will begin supporting expanded text advertisements (ETAs), an announcement similar to the one Google made earlier this month during its I/O conference.

This change means rather than marketers using the ad format between 25 and 71 characters on Bing, the ad format will expand to between 60 and 80 characters, with two 30-character headlines and 80 characters for ad text.

Bing also will allow for domains to automatically generate a final URL and custom path, rather than 35-character display URL. It will give marketers options to include two descriptive words in a sub-directory format after the domain. 

James Chung, Bing Ads program manager at Microsoft, hopes that for advertisers the change means more clicks, increased click-through-rates and more customer traffic to your Web site.

Chung tells marketers in a post that the support becomes available later this summer on the Bing Web UI, Desktop Editor, as an optional upgrade, and API. Preparing for the change means getting in touch with the vendor that provides the company's search engine marketing (SEM) tool or agency to understand their Expanded Text Ads strategy to optimize campaign ad copy. 

The changes were previewed at the Bing Ads Quarterly API call Tuesday.