The search engine watch forums have a post about a new experimental TextAds program to display description limited to 200 characters.
Invited advertisers will be able to enter up to 200 characters in the description field, which should be similar to the description that currently exists. The title, Display URL, and Destination URL of the ad will remain the same.
Google will alternate showing the regular ad text with the longer version of the text. They also plan to experiment with slight layout variations of the longer ad text in order to determine which layout design will perform the best.
Charges will be the same amount when someone clicks on an ad – no matter what version is shown. The clickthrough rate of the longer creatives will be excluded from Quality Score calculations, and will not affect regular ads’ ranking either positively or negatively.
