Innovations in PPC Advert Copy

Something caught my eye today on Google. It was a PPC ad with what looked like weird symbols in the advert's title. After a quick double-take, I realised that is pretty much what it was! Check out the ad below:


It seems what they've done is add ASCII characters into their Adwords ads, and somehow got it through editorial. I saw another add for this same company with a ">" in the title.

So is Adwords now allowing people to add symbols and weird characters to their ads? Probably not. You can get some through editorial (especially easy if you upload using Adwords Editor), but eventually they'll get pulled. It would be interesting to see what effect these symbols have on CTR. I would imagine it might have a positive impact on CTR, but not conversion rates.........some say it would serve these cheeky advertisers right, too ;-)