It’s no secret that Bing are continually trying to play catch up to AdWords when it comes to features on their search engines.

It happened with Structured Snippets, it happened with Expanded Text ads, and it happened with Product Listing Ads, to name a few. However sometimes Bing will release something new, something that Google hasn’t tried.

Bing call them Annotations, and they’re generally a sound idea. Bing will add in little annotations to your ads based on various signals it gets. Think of them as automatic extensions.

You can read about the various types here, some of which are the same as Google’s such as “Merchant Ratings” which are the equivalent of Google’s Seller Ratings.

This blog post is about one particular annotation. We’re not sure which annotation from the list is it, it could be a “Smart Annotation” or it could be a “Dynamic Description Annotation”, or something else.

If we were to describe this annotation, we’d say that it is:

“Bing attempting to insert useful snippets of copy from the website in to the ads”

We reached out to Bing from an explanation of this annotation and they say

“an annotation which dynamically pulling text from the site”

“it is a smart annotation it can take any text the system deems relevant to the ad copy”

“the idea is to enhance clients’ ads”

Our issue with this annotation is that Bing often pulls useless or irrelevant copy from the website. This copy is injected in to the ads, and can make it look pretty bad.

This is especially true when the copy injected in to the ad is cut off mid-sentence, often ending in a sentence that makes no sense.

You’ll be able to tell when you see one of these annotations as they’ll end in an ellipsis (…).

Currently the only way to remove these pesky annotations is to talk to your Bing rep.

We recommend you check your ads and consider if you want to opt out as well. The annotations may change each time Bing re-crawl your website.

Here are 10 examples (none of them our clients) that we found in the wild. Click on the image to open it in a new tab: