Expanded text ads end Thursday. Here is the plan.

Google gave everyone ten months of notice and most accounts have spent nine of them ignoring it. On Thursday, 30 June, expanded text ads can no longer be created or edited. Responsive search ads become the only text ad you can build in a search campaign.

First, the part that stops the panic. Your existing expanded text ads do not disappear on Friday morning. They keep serving, they keep reporting, and you can still pause them, turn them back on or remove them. What you lose is the ability to write a new one or fix a typo in an old one. That is still a real loss, because for most local businesses the expanded text ads in the account are the only place where the exact promise that wins the click is written down.

So the work this week is not migration. It is preservation. Here is the order we are doing it in for client accounts.

Before Thursday: save what already works

Anything you cannot edit after Thursday, you want recorded somewhere you can read it later.

1. Export ad performance by ad group for the last twelve months, not the last thirty days. Seasonal businesses need the full year or you will judge a heating ad on June numbers.
2. For each ad group, identify the one or two expanded text ads doing the work, by conversions rather than clickthrough rate.
3. Copy their headlines and descriptions into a document, ad group by ad group. This becomes the source material for everything you build afterward.
4. Note the pins. If headline one was always the city and service, or always “24/7 emergency service”, write that down as a rule, not just as text.
5. Write down the promises that appear across the winners: financing, same-day service, family owned since a given year, free estimate, evening appointments, whatever it is in your trade. These are what customers respond to, and they are about to be reassembled by a machine.

Do this before Thursday, because after Thursday you can read the ads but you cannot experiment with them.

Build the responsive search ad around the promises, not the keywords

A responsive search ad gives you up to fifteen headlines and four descriptions, and Google mixes them. The mistake we see in local accounts is treating those fifteen slots as fifteen ways to say the same thing. Fifteen rewordings of “Dentist in Springfield” produces an ad that says nothing.

Give the system genuinely different material instead. In the accounts we run, the headline set that holds up looks roughly like this:

• Two or three that name the service and the city, because relevance to the search still matters.
• Two or three offers or reasons to act now: same-day appointments, free estimate, new patient exam, weekend hours.
• Two or three proof points: years in business, financing available, warranty, the thing your competitors cannot claim.
• Two or three calls to action, including one that says what happens next rather than “contact us”.
• One or two that answer the objection that costs you the most calls: cost, wait time, parking, emergencies.

Descriptions do the same job at more length, and only two show, so put the important thing in both.

Pin carefully, and only where you must

Pinning locks a headline to a position. It is the right tool for the promises you cannot let Google drop, and the wrong tool for everything else.

We pin sparingly. If a claim is regulated, if the ad must carry a specific offer, or if a phrase is the reason the account works, pin it to position one and leave the rest of the slots free. Pin eight headlines and you have rebuilt an expanded text ad with extra steps, and the campaign loses the only thing the new format is genuinely better at, which is matching the wording of the ad to the wording of the search.

Ad Strength is guidance, not a ranking factor. Google has said so repeatedly. Chase conversions, not a green label, and ignore the recommendation to add headlines that dilute a good ad into a generic one.

Do not switch everything off at once

Leave the expanded text ads running alongside the new responsive search ads for a few weeks. Let them accumulate data in the same auctions, then judge by conversions and by cost per booked job, not by impressions.

Two practical notes. There is a limit of three responsive search ads per ad group, so you cannot test six variants at once, which is fine because you should not want to. And ad groups with very few keywords will take longer to produce a readable result, so if the account is split into twenty near-identical ad groups, this is a good week to consolidate them into something that can actually learn.

The landing page is now half the ad

When the headline is assembled at auction time, the page underneath has to keep whatever promise got assembled. That makes the landing page part of the ad rather than the thing that happens afterward.

The checks that matter for a local business are short. The page names the same service and the same city as the campaign that sent the visitor. The phone number is visible without scrolling on a phone and it dials when tapped. The form asks for the fewest fields you can book an appointment with. The page loads fast on a mediocre phone connection, which since February matters on desktop results too, now that page experience applies there. And there is one clear next step, not four competing ones.

If you have one page for six services and you are sending six ad groups to it, the responsive search ads will make that mismatch more obvious, not less.

What to do this month

• Export twelve months of ad performance and save the text of your best expanded text ads before Thursday.
• Build one responsive search ad per ad group from those promises, with varied headlines rather than synonyms.
• Pin only what must appear, and no more than one or two headlines per ad.
• Leave the old ads running for a few weeks and compare on conversions, not clickthrough rate.
• Consolidate ad groups too small to gather data, and make sure each one has a page that matches it.
• Book a calendar reminder for the end of July to review the results while the comparison is still available.

None of this is a crisis, but it is a deadline, and deadlines are where accounts quietly lose ground to whoever did the work. If you want it handled, this is the kind of week our Google Ads clients hand over, and it usually pays to fix the pages the ads point at while the account is open anyway. Owners who would rather understand the account than run it can see how we work with local businesses.