The keen observers out there will have noticed that Google have started displaying their sponsored ads much closer to the organic listings and away from the right hand scroll bar. Google has always expanded the results pages to fit the full width of the browser. As computer display resolutions have become larger, the sponsored ads have drifted further away from the main results.
At first, this looked like part of an ongoing test to determine the effect on their revenues of moving the sponsored links away from the edge of the page. However given the scale of the change we have observed, it is likely that Google are already very confident about the impact this change will have.
Changing the location of the ads has almost certainly been done to increase the number of clicks on the PPC ads but the question remains "What does this mean for advertisers?"
It will be interesting to see just how much of an increase in traffic advertisers experience and more importantly how this affects the quality of the traffic they receive. It's reasonable to expect that click-through rates for the top 3 paid listings to be unchanged, but for ads down the side to receive a boost. Of course, the data will tell us what the actual impact is.
It will be essential for advertisers to closely monitor any change in click through rates and the total traffic that they receive from their AdWords campaigns over the coming days and weeks. The important thing is then to react to these changes in the right way. Advertisers working to fixed monthly budgets may need to reduce bids to control spend levels however advertisers working towards some kind of performance goal may find that there is no need to make changes if conversion rates are unaffected. If however conversion rates do take a hit from this change then it will be crucial to adjust bids across your keyword portfolio to make sure your advertising budget is getting spent in the best way possible.
We will be monitoring this change across our client base at Efficient Frontier and we will share any findings as soon as we have the data.
Phil Dance, UK Account Manager
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