At the moment, some sites displaying Yahoo ads show 70 characters, while others show the full 190 characters, but recently there has been lots of discussion regarding the 70 character limit for ads being made compulsory across the board.  There is a good article over on Clickz about Yahoo!'s decision to show only truncated 70 character ads in the states, at the moment for european advertisers this only applies for France where it is currently being tested.

Truncation isn't a new thing and in the back of the Pay Per Click Handbook it was one of the expert topics we discussed - how to manage truncation for different display formats. As default we've always use 70 characters for Yahoo! search to avoid the annoying mid sentence cut offs by some of their distribution channels.

Our opinion - if standardising the formats helps the campaign management process it's a good thing.  Here's a quick tip for managing Yahoo!'s ads.

Truncation Tips - Calculating truncation points

Search engine page layouts vary greatly. We are often limited to the amount of text we are able to write within an advertisement. For example MSN listings contain abbreviated Yahoo! Search / Overture sponsored ads on the right hand side of the page, but full length ads at the top.

Truncated ads are limited to 70 characters, whereby the ads across the top have a greater length of 125 characters. The ideal scenario would be to write your ad so that it appears clearly and unabbreviated for each position.

This is achievable by creating the ad in two sentences with the first sentence ending precisely at 70 characters:

Thus the ad will appear unabbreviated on the right hand side:

Then if you bid and position your ad at the top of the page, you achieve an increased ad length and are able to display more of your message:

Calculating truncation points gives you the maximum possibility to present effective messaging towards your target audience.