In the last few months since Larry Page has taken the helm as CEO at Google he has been making a lot of changes to their services. They’ve been changing the look and feel of their various properties, even changing the functionality of their search pages. Larry has even said the company would
“put more wood behind fewer arrows.”
This is the first in a series of post that will discuss some of the changes we feel are import for you to know about.
New Google Search Ad Placement
The first update you may have noticed as you were using Google Search is a redesign of ad placement. Ads that previously appeared on the right side of search results will in some cases be moved to below search results.
Below is an example of how the new search results may look.
here’s what Google has to say about the new format:
“In many cases, we have found that displaying ads below search results is better aligned with the way users scan the page from top to bottom. On average, this placement performed better than side ads in terms of click-through rate in our tests.”
If you want to know if your ads are performing better in the top positions as apposed to all other positions, you’re in luck. Google will soon be launching a custom “Top vs. Other” segment. All placements on the side, at the bottom are labeled and other experimental placements will be labeled as “other”.
What troubles me is they lump them together, so you can’t really tell which ads are getting more traffic. I think the real motivation is to gain more real estate in the right column for other things. This is something I’ll talk about later though.
