
Google AdWords Switching to 4 Ads on Top, None on Sidebar - myth_drannon
http://www.thesempost.com/google-adwords-switching-to-4-ads-on-top-none-on-sidebar
======
shostack
I do paid search for a living, and it has been fascinating to watch the
evolution of the SERPs.

This one is a big step backwards IMHO. For many queries now, the first page
has essentially become an interstitial.

I have to say I feel it is quite "un-Googley" in the sense of the search
team's balance against the AdWords team. Many people like to rail against
Google for various things, but historically they've always done a pretty solid
job of maintaining this internal balance.

Some will argue that "if the results are relevant to the query, that is all
that matters." But this is going a step too far in that the only results are
the ones paid for, which means there is another factor beyond "relevancy" at
play (despite how CTR impacts Quality Score).

All of this is on top of advertiser concerns that CPCs are likely to rise as a
result (which I agree is likely to occur). While not the case for my account
in particular, the net result is also likely to make it harder for small local
advertisers to compete on the paid side when they are up against large
national advertisers.

Personally, I'm going to focus on beefing up our Bing presence and other non-
paid channels. Diversification is important, and ultimately there's not much
that can be done about it. Businesses will continue to pay the CPCs they can
afford until they are no longer profitable, and then they won't. Those who
don't diversify will suffer the consequences of putting all their eggs in one
marketing basket.

~~~
ssharp
In my experience, Bing Ads are far more profitable than AdWords anyway. I
don't know if it's an audience thing or if businesses ignore Bing altogether
or underfund/manage it.

~~~
shostack
Depends on the audience as they have different demographics. Bing also has
substantially lower volume, so can be a headache to manage separately without
a bid management platform.

That said, Bing has a consistent history of mirroring AdWords changes, so this
will likely occur on Bing as well. The key though is diversification because
while they might do this as well, their ROAS might still be higher in the long
run.

~~~
hayksaakian
I thought bing already showed more ads on a serp than google

~~~
shostack
It varies. I just did a search for "car insurance" on Bing and it was all ads
above the fold (aside from the "Related Searches" block in the upper right).
My point was more in following suit with the removal of the right siderail
ads.

But they both have awful experiences with the above-the-fold first page
results now if I'm approaching it from a "consumer wanting a non-compensated
search result" standpoint. They both now have interstitials on the SERP for
all intents and purposes.

------
aresant
"It's a bug that you could rank highly in Google without buying ads, and
Google is trying to fix the bug." (1)

I love that quote - by HN's own jrockway - when he was under employ at Google.
He wound up effectively retracting and clarifying (2) but I believe it
wholeheartedly in original form.

When you take apart Google's "Page Quality Score" algorithm they use to
determine what to charge / rank you for each click you can see the brilliant
intersection of Google's business and their product.

AKA they believe that the most reliable way to drive search relevancy is to
make sure the guy on the other end of the table is willing to pay for that
user's attention.

And they'll penalize the advertiser if they don't hit "relevancy" metrics to
make it more expensive for that advertiser to reach you.

The relevancy metrics they'll use include page speed (good for user), time
user spends on site (relevancy), actions taken - tracked by Google Analytics
(relevancy), and content quality / uniqueness (relevancy).

If you've got a guy willing to pay with high relevancy it's a compelling
reason to show nothing but ads.

Now is that REALLY good for the user across the board? No way.

Does this leave in the dust the small guys and dramatically favor the big guys
with time and attention to get everything right? Totally.

Is every small business going to wind up paying a "Google Tax" \- no question.

But still, that's why they do it.

(1)
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3535153](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3535153)

(2) [http://searchengineland.com/google-clarifies-no-ads-
shouldnt...](http://searchengineland.com/google-clarifies-no-ads-shouldnt-
help-rankings-no-seo-isnt-bad-110673)

~~~
StavrosK
Now that you mention that, does anyone else find it incredibly scummy that
Google shows ads for a company, leading to the company's website, above the
first result, which is _also the company 's website_ when I search for
something like the company name?

The ad is minimally distinguished from the content, and most users don't care
anyway, they'll click the top result and cost the company money that they
could have saved if Google didn't present that ad there.

I guess, however, that the alternative is an ad for Bar, Inc appearing above
Foo, Inc when you search for "foo, inc". In that case, it feels like extortion
("if you want us to show your website first when users search for you, buy the
ad").

~~~
matt4077
Some SEO guy once told me companies decide to buy these ads because it costs
essentially nothing (b/c CTR is almost 100%) and improves the advertisers
quality score.

~~~
soared
This is the correct answer. Metrics that determine cost for these specific ads
are so high, that the cpc is very low. This also ensures competitors don't buy
it out, but also allows a company to slightly alter the consumer's journey (by
choosing the messaging in the ad).

------
Lazare
Okay, so let's search for...I dunno, 'crm' in a maximised google chrome
browser on a 13" macbook pro:
[http://i.imgur.com/rT51tmt.png](http://i.imgur.com/rT51tmt.png)

This is not okay. I have to scroll down quite a bit just to see an actual
search result. From searching. On Google. Does anyone else see the problem
here?

~~~
aklemm
It's disturbing. Sure, Google is worlds away from where it started, but to
violate trust in search is a bridge too far.

------
wheaties
...and this is how Google opens itself to attack from a group that is ready to
"disrupt" search. I, for one, love DuckDuckGo because my search results yield
...wait for it, search results! No, seriously, that's why I go there in the
first place. To find stuff.

Google has forgotten why they were successful in the first place and has
instead pushed monetization to the detriment of their flag ship product.

~~~
ftio
Google hasn't forgotten anything.

Anecdotally, most users do not know the difference between paid results and
organic results, and the top paid result is usually what the user wants
anyway.

Do you think Google didn't test this on millions (billions, even) of searches?
If showing additional paid results negatively impacted either CTR or first-
search successes or whatever metrics Google thought were important for their
long-term success, they'd have surely not gone all in on this model.

Paid results _are_ search results.

~~~
gboudrias
Although I'm sure you're correct, this is a very short-sighted mentality,
which I believe to be the downfall of most big corporations (short-term
thinking).

Power users definitely know the difference between paid results and real
results, and over time will steer everyone they can off of Google if it
persists in showing a lack of respect for the intelligence of its users. It
might take a long time, but some will leave, and over time more will follow.

But that won't show in the next quarter's projections, and after that it will
be too late.

~~~
imron
Exactly. There's a reason I switched from altavista to google back in the late
nineties.

I'm sure altavista was guided by various metrics too, but those weren't the
metrics that I as a search user found important.

~~~
rsync
It's odd you would say that because, looking back, no search engine has ever
been more precise or feature filled than altavista was.

You could do very complex boolean logic searches with multiple, nested (())
and "" ...

As opposed to google where even the "allinsite:" tag does not even function
properly anymore, and where half of your search results will _not even
contain_ your search terms.

I really miss altavista, actually ...

~~~
imron
I don't miss scrolling past a page of ads before getting to search results.

You are right that Google deciding to 'helpfully' remove terms from my search
query is frustrating.

------
imh
Jesus, a search for business cards returns literally nothing but ads until I
scroll down. Time turn ad block on for google.

~~~
grahamburger
Are the ads relevant to the search query?

~~~
fweespeech
Keyword wise? Yes.

Useful services I'd like to purchase? Fuck no.

I'm not even bothering with !g anymore.

~~~
stevesearer
What makes them not useful services you would want to purchase and what would
be your ideal search results?

The companies that advertise on that query for me are Vistaprint, Moo,
Staples, Uprinting and a few others. I've used both Moo (business cards) and
Uprinting (Christmas cards) and found them to be great.

~~~
jessriedel
Google ads seems to be useful/relevant when the best businesses in the sector
are national, but crummy when the best ones are local. For instance, most
folks want funeral homes that are locally owned (which is why lots of national
organization pretend to be family owned). The ads returned when searching
Google for "casket" are mostly useless link farms that try to pretend they are
local.

Of course, there's only so much Google can do to encourage local businesses to
advertise with them, but given the paucity of ads that the user is likely to
find useful, they'd be better served with few or none on those sorts of
searchers.

~~~
anexprogrammer
Google could make one change for smaller and new advertisers and have a
dramatic uptick in retention.

 _turn off broad match as the default_

Usual scenario for a new small adwords advertiser is join, spend $500 for
little noticeable gain, leave. Most of their traffic will have been irrelevant
because of the broad match default.

------
soared
This article was posted yesterday, heres my predictions:

Extremely interested and slightly wary as to how this will affect ppc. My
informed predictions:

\- CPC increases across the board

\- CTR increases across the board

\- AdWords loses smaller ad buyers who simply can't compete for a top 3 spot

\- More stringent requirements about ad content

\- Awareness ads (not directly leading to a purchase or conversion) will be
unable to compete on cpc

\- Longtail keywords become more important, overall number of keywords brands
are targeting will increase

Ultimately I think this helps big brands who can afford top spots. They can
afford higher cpcs, and better keyword bid strategies. Google's revenue will
increase, but the number of ad purchasers will decrease. Ad quality (if there
is such a thing) will become "better" by aligning more with users search
intentions (Read: ads looking more and more like organic results).

I work at a digital agency, so these are only 90% bullshit predictions.

~~~
mahranch
And what about user experience? It's times like these where I do not feel
guilty about using an adblock, despite being a publisher myself, and hosting
google ads on my website. Is it hypocritical? Probably. But I would think the
issue isn't completely black and white.

Also, as a publisher who provides educational content (I'm not mentioning my
website's name, but it's very, _very_ similar to mentalfloss.com or the TIL
reddit subreddit [even though my website has been around longer than both]),
increasing the top ads is going to hurt my traffic. It's a bit of a selfish
reason but at least I know the people who are searching for those terms are
looking for _exactly_ what's on my website. In many cases, my site is the only
one with that information.

~~~
soared
I'm in a similar spot and totally agree. Despite buying tons of ads and having
adsense on my sites, I use adblock and other ad/script blocking extensions.

It may be hypocritical, but I have a huge huge counterpoint that I've been
thinking about writing a big blog post on: AdBlockers help Google. Here is the
thought.. If you use an adblocker, you wouldn't be clicking ads anyway. So you
are helping advertisers by making their targeting better targeted. We don't
even load ads, so they are served to people more likely to click on them. This
logic doesn't really work for cpc, but it does for cpm. Also haven't fully
thought it through.

------
ninedays
Title is a bit misleading. It should say that Google also adds a fourth line
in the ads displayed above organic search results. The title makes it look
like the only changes was the removal of the side ads.

------
bhartzer
Google's testing must have shown them that removing the ads on the sidebar
will ultimately make them more money.

~~~
Nagyman
91% of paid clicks are on the top three ads. The side ads are not worth it.
I'm not sure how the fourth top ad will perform.

(source: Google's AdWords account team)

~~~
anexprogrammer
Depends. Google's AdWords account team want the maximum spend out of you, not
best performance, so up that bid!

If you are a small business or one person the main block is simply overpriced
- by a long way for many keywords, and is just the brands usually.

Top 1 or 2 in the sidebar are usually noticeably cheaper and do bring in a
decent amount of clicks for popular keywords. I'd call it the sweet spot for
someone bootstrapping or a tiny business. Sure you'll get more clicks bumping
to 3rd in the main block, but _only if you can afford 24 /7 coverage_ on that
keyword. If your budget is limiting display then increasing bid will mean less
business overall.

------
nevir
The thing that's interesting is that quite frequently the site or page I am
searching for shows up as an ad as well as an organic result.

While I've trained myself to ignore ad results, I find myself feeling guilty
when in this situation. Should I click the ad? Does it support the site, or
hinder it?

~~~
soared
There is little net effect. Its discussed in detail above, but the brand pays
very little when you search for "nike" and click on the top ad that is
"nike.com" Google knows you were going there anyway, and their metrics support
it, so cpc is low for Nike but would be insanely high for Adidas.

------
Grue3
4 ads on top for a search page, what a fucking joke. On a small screen you'd
probably only see the ads before a single actual search result. This is pure
greed and abuse of monopoly at this point.

~~~
smegel
On my search page, I just saw exactly one search result after 4 ads and a
Google "summary" grid. And the first search result was spammy.

Fucking joke indeed.

Edit: just switched my default search engine in Chrome to DuckDuckGo, 2 Ads
and 6 decent search results on the first search page. Let's give it a shot and
see if I ever go back.

------
chipperyman573
Doesn't this break Google's own rule of 3 ads above the fold? Or do ads that
are integrated well into the page not count?

~~~
tyingq
It has the nice side effect of pushing down the organic results. On a 1440x900
screen, I see only 1 organic result above the fold for most "purchase intent"
queries now.

It feels like there must be insane internal pressure to continue the double-
digit percentage YoY gains in ad clicks.

~~~
aantix
It always felt disingenuous on Googles part to first display a paid ad for the
site that I googled when the first organic result is also for that site. If i
google for eBay, and i unknowingly click the first "result", why should eBay
be charged a click through on that? Bull shit.

------
SmallBets
I think this is more about competition from Amazon than other search engines.
The focus on "commercial queries" tells me there's a mini death spiral of
buyers going straight to Amazon to do those commercial searches. This will let
them get in between more purchases short term but drive more users straight to
Amazon long term.

------
nivla
To be fair the side ads were the least noticed by me. There were times when I
even confused the top ad with the actual search result.

Slightly off topic but has anyone noticed the new side loading ads on a
youtube video? I keep accidentally clicking on them when moving the slider. It
passes through all ad blockers and obstructs part of the playing video.

~~~
peter303
Also there are spam sites that are almost the same name as actual sites such
airline tickets and concert venues. They manage to come on top of search
results.

------
kbenson
Is there any info on how much a Google contributor subscription does or does
not affect the ad placement for search results? I've been considering signing
up for that so I don't see as many ads, and opening up Google ads in ublock,
but multiple ads above results on the top of searches would quickly become
unbearable.

~~~
thirtyseven
Contributor will replace ads from AdSense (ads you see on independent
publisher sites), not AdWords (ads on Google result pages). They're separate
networks.

~~~
kbenson
I suspected that might be the case, which is why I asked. That's unfortunate,
but with further information it looks like the search result ads displayed is
highly dependent on whether they think your search was commercial in nature,
so I guess I'll see how much it affects me in practice.

------
tlogan
They should rename "Google search" into "Google advertisement search". Since
when I search on Google I just get ads above the fold. This is a slight
inconvenience for me and but significant inconvenience for my mother in law.

I cannot judge whether this is good or bad from point of view of Google.

------
melted
They should just switch to showing nothing but ads in the first page of
results and be done with it. I'm sure they will find a way to justify how this
is "good for the users", but for me, with my widescreen laptop, the 4th ad
will ruin usability even further.

------
Mattzy
I've worked in paid search for some time now and can't help but chime in.

I'd agree CPC/CTR will increase. But if you think about it, the real logical
reason for the change is that Google needs more real-estate. Search is
continuing to evolve (I.e, the way the you and I look for information), and
Google has been testing new ad formats to better serve queries.

Limiting the number of traditional paid search ads is the only way they can
continue to maintain a balance between SEO & paid search while testing new ad
formats.

I wouldn't at all be surprised if they began testing a new product in the
latter half of 2016

~~~
sumoboy
It's surprising google hasn't reduced the number organic listings from 10 to 7
or even lower on page 1. For alot of queries ad's are really better results.
Google definitely has plans for all that new white space real estate.

~~~
dragonwriter
> For alot of queries ad's are really better results.

I have yet to see _any_ queries where the ads are _better_ results than the
organic results; I occasionally see queries where the ads _duplicate_ some of
the the best organic results, which are already at the top of the organic
results.

------
anexprogrammer
Inevitable I guess because of mobile. I don't imagine it will be popular with
their smaller advertisers though.

The main block tends to be dominated by the brands and the cost to get into
the main block is too expensive for a smaller advertiser. Aiming for the top
of the side bar ads can do pretty well getting business for a reasonable
price.

Add in the number of knowledge graph results that now come from some
horrifically spammy sites and G is looking a very unfriendly place for a tiny
business to start up with.

~~~
HappyTypist
Small businesses are dead. It's now hyperfunded startups.

------
peter303
Far less intrusive than Yahoo or Twitter ads that are intermingled among the
feeds. At least with Yahoo there is slight color background difference.

------
graeme
How long would duckduckgo have to grow at its current rate to become an actual
blip on Google's radar?

[https://duckduckgo.com/traffic.html](https://duckduckgo.com/traffic.html)

------
Justsignedup
This makes me so happy to have adblock on chrome.

Frankly though, I'd use duckduckgo, but the android integration is so
(intentionally by google) terrible.

Side note: Google includes YAHOO search, but not DDG. Because Yahoo poses no
threat to them.

------
chiefalchemist
Less slots means more demand. More demand means higher prices. The irony is,
less ads probably means more clicks per page views.

The real question is: What took them so long to do this?

------
kevindeasis
DuckDuckGo places their ads on the top. Top ads looks much nicer. I bet the
conversion rate of those CTA would be significantly higher.

------
andrew950
Very wise move. I don't think the CTR of the Sidebar ads were that high and it
is also more structured this way.

------
bpg_92
Wow and Adblock doesn't seem to work on these, WE ARE DOOMED!

~~~
mhurron
It doesn't? Are you sure? Google must just be being nice to me and not showing
ads.

------
diminish
Will there be a day when organic results will fall below 20% CTR?

