Google layout change not great news for Adwords advertisers says Bonfire CEO Cook
Advertising on Google is competitive at the best of times. Google has just made the game even harder by announcing a major change to the way it will display ads in its search results page.
As of late last week, Google will no longer be show its AdWords ads on the right hand side of the search results pages. These ads will only be displayed at the top and bottom of the results page. However, if the search query is “highly commercial”, then Google may increase the number of ads at the top to four.
Traditionally, there were approximately 10 ads displayed across the search results both above and adjacent to the “organic” search listings. The ads to the right will now be replaced with Knowledge Graph Boxes (when searching for a brand), Product Listing Ads (when searching for a product) or simply blank space.
For example, a search for “Travel insurance” on Google now displays a results page with only 4 paid ads above the organic results. There is nothing but blank space on the right hand side.
According to Clay Cook (pictured), CEO of Digital Marketing agency, Bonfire, this change isn’t great news for Google AdWords advertisers.
“With significantly less ad space, this change will certainly drive up average Cost Per Clicks as the competition for the top spots increases.”
This change will also impact the organic listings. With potentially four ads now being displayed at the top of the search results, organic listings are pushed even further below the “fold” of most screens which will force users to scroll further to see all the results.
Cook suggests that the change to ads will mean businesses need to increase their focus on Google AdWords and SEO activities.
“This change is really significant. Fundamentally it means competition will increase across both. Business owners will need to ensure they are engaging in a good mix of both, but managing them more closely and working a lot smarter.”
Cook said this change brings the desktop Google experience closer to that on mobile and will effect advertisers worldwide, in all languages.
“At the moment, Google says four ads will only be shown at the top of the results page for “highly commercial” queries. But how long will this last? When you consider Google’s AdWords revenue rose by 17% and accounted for $19.08 billion of it’s overall revenue in the last fiscal year, it seems like four ads being the norm is only a matter of time.”
4 Comments
To quote Clay, “managing them more closely and working a lot smarter.”
We agree completely – smarter in 2016: We advise companies and agencies to tighten up their measurement of web leads. As the old saying goes, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it”.
Scott Shorter PTY LTD
Rand Fishkin of Moz suggested that organic listings are not affected by this change.
According to WordStream, on an average 15% of the clicks happen on side ads. There will be accounts for which this number is far higher and will be affected by this change.
Here’s an AdWords script that will help you identify accounts and keywords that could be severely impacted. This script goes through your account (or all the accounts if you use it at MCC-level) and finds out the keywords that received a lot of clicks from the side positions.
http://www.karooya.com/blog/no-side-ads-adwords-script-to-identify-keywords-under-threat/
Shashi
Co-founder, Karooya.com
To ensure making the top 3 (or 4) ads, smart advertisers will focus on improving their keyword scores before moving to increasing bids straight away. That means closer message match between search phrase, ad copy and landing page copy.
If you’ve had an AdWords campaign setup in a “cheap and nasty way” then this is going to mean you have a lot of work ahead of you. Each keyword needs its own unique and highly relevant ad copy as opposed to a bunch of similar keywords bundled together which are all running the same ad.
James Garnaut
Digital Marketing Consultant @ Living Online (www.livingonline.com.au)
Perhaps best we shift back to investing in directories??