© Jellyfish Online Marketing Ltd 2011

Jellyfish POV Ability to show PPC ads at the bottom of search results making little difference so far (not yet at least) 19| 01 | 2012

Jellyfish POV PPC ads below search results

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Introduction It’s been a few months now since Google started to occasionally move sponsored links from the right hand side of the search results page to below them, so we can start to get an idea of the impact, if any, this has had on the search space and what it’s likely to mean for PPC advertisers in the future. Getting data to show the affect has been made quite opaque by Google. There was a joyous response from PPC advertisers when Google started to show details of how often position 1 showed ‘above natural results’ or ‘top right’ when they launched the top vs. side segmentation report within Adwords, which showed the huge difference in click through rates of the two. Analysis by just about everyone at the time showed that if you weren’t top left, you were seriously missing out.

Jellyfish POV PPC ads below search results

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Here’s some eye tracking analysis from Eyetools to see exactly how little attention users pay to the right ads:

‘Top vs. side’ segmentation has now been replaced with ‘top vs. other’ to mark the change in ad position on the page. Notice it’s not ‘top vs. side vs. bottom’ – Google does not currently tell us when ads are on the right or when they’re beneath the organic links. It seems odd that Google would give out some great functionality and then remove its effectiveness, especially when it acts as an incentive for advertisers to raise bids to get top left ad positions. Unless of course, there isn’t much difference in reality over the effectiveness of the right hand and bottom ads so it’s not a priority – or they have other plans for the right of the results page…

Jellyfish POV PPC ads below search results

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When Google started moving the ads, many predicted that the effect wouldn’t be huge simply because of the toothlessness of the right hand ads. This, it seems, looks correct. Pulling some data from a large financial services client, we received on average a 0.13% click through rate for ads on Google with ‘other’ position before the change, and 0.15% when ads were being shown on the right or the bottom. For this client, a 0.02 point rise in click through rate for ‘other’ ad positions represents a 0.18% increase in total click volumes. Not really enough to get too excited about for a large advertiser used to high positions. Comparing to another large client, CTRs were 0.33% when ads were only on the right and 0.34% when shown either of the right or at the bottom. CPCs for the most part so far seem to have been unaffected; but we’re only just past Christmas and bids are settling down again so it remains to be seen whether that will continue to be the case. A slight increase in click through rate is predictable; when the ad is shown at the bottom there are a maximum of 5 other sponsored links on the page compared to potentially 10 others when the right hand box is activated. That said, the changes are very small and statistically insignificant which is actually probably down the fact the ads still aren’t being shown at the bottom for a great deal of search queries (only about 10-15% of searches). So until they are being shown down below a lot more often, results are still somewhat inconclusive as to what the overall effect will be. So a knock on effect of this is that advertisers camped out in position 7 won’t be on the first page any more, assuming it was on the first page previously. But as we’ve seen, the proportion of clicks is tiny anyway. Which probably isn’t too much of a problem to a small advertiser bidding based on ROI (as any good PPC advertiser should) fighting against bigger ones and is able to accept lower volumes – remember it’s generally accepted that conversion rate is not affected by position. Google will take their lower position and therefore lower CTR into account when calculating quality score. Now, lower position advertisers could have to raise bids. Google’s ulterior motive for the move however was revealed recently with the launch of a new section to their results page –

Jellyfish POV PPC ads below search results

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putting Google+ links with brand images on the right hand column where the sponsored links used to be –see Search Engine Land’s article for more details. Google experimented previously with mixing up what’s shown top right, most recently with product ads with images but still with sponsored links shown underneath. The Google+ links are not only there by themselves, but for now they’re free.

This makes a huge amount of sense for Google – replacing links which don’t earn them a vast amount of revenue as well as more likely to be of lower relevancy with links to their own product to continue to push the uptake of Google+ and fight Facebook’s market share. The addition of that placement forces advertisers to setup their Google+ pages if they haven’t already or risk missing out on a huge amount of relevant traffic as well as social signals that will help their online brand as a whole. So unless you’re a small advertiser relying on lower ad positions to make ends meet, it’s not worth a change in PPC strategy now that ads are at the bottom too. The real game changer however will be when advertisers will be competing against a new kind of placement which stands out a lot better than their previous ads. And so if you’re not taking you social strategy seriously yet, there is all the more reason now to be doing so with full gusto.