New Stealthier Ads Are A Big Hit For Google

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google

John Koetsier wrote a very interesting piece on Venture Beat on how the new look of Google ads is boosting click through rates. Back in March Computer World explained,

Google is testing some changes to the way it displays search results, including a tweak to how it presents paid links that could throw off unsuspecting users.

Paid links in Google’s search results are marked today with a yellow shaded background. Under the experimental layout, which is being widely tested with users, a small yellow button that says “Ad” appears in front of paid links instead.

Now the Venture Beat article took data from a study conducted by Adobe, that shows the change has worked and it should be good news for the company ahead of its quarterly earnings report due out today.

From the article:

The data is in, and Google’s new stealthier, blended-in, less-obviously-an-ad offerings have boosted clickthroughs tremendously: They’re up 20 percent just in the last quarter. That should be good news for Google when the company reports Q2 earnings tomorrow.

A massive Adobe ad study of over $2 billion in ad spend shows that not only are clickthroughs up, so are costs: CPCs rose slightly by four percent over the same period. In contrast, Yahoo/Bing search ad CPCs declined.

Why?

“Mobile and tablet are having an impact there,” Adobe director of product marketing Tim Waddell told me yesterday. “Not to mention the switchover to Google’s new ad types … going away from the different background colors.”

Google Ads used to be obvious, with a different background color than the rest of the page, which clearly highlighted them as commercial content. At the beginning of this year, however, Google changed its format, giving ads the same white background as the rest of the page and replacing it with a substantially smaller “Ad” notification.

Read the full article which contains some interesting charts comparing the results here.

About Raymond Hackney

Raymond is a writer, domain trader and consultant based in Pennsylvania. Raymond is the founder of 3Character.com and TLDInvestors.com.

Comments

  1. Lance Zeidman says

    Funny because I couldnt disagree more with these statements:
    “Google Ads used to be obvious, with a different background color than the rest of the page, which clearly highlighted them as commercial content. At the beginning of this year, however, Google changed its format, giving ads the same white background as the rest of the page and replacing it with a substantially smaller “Ad” notification.”

    used to be obvious, —–was not exactly true since most people i surveyed said they had no idea and could barely see the yellow highllighted area that was so close to the color white. i agree.
    substantially smaller “ad” button / stealthier?? I disagree. now everyone knows clearly its an ad. The fact that click through sales went up was hardly because it was not so obvious to the user. The end result doesnt equate this to be part of the formula as I see it by common sense alone is a contradiction.

    To be clear i dont deny click throughs are up, just that this reason of an “ad” button was more unsuspecting than the no ad button and barely visible color background it had prior.

    • Steve Cheatham says

      That is in Adsense where I am making money on clicks. The ads I display on my sites that use responsive ads from adsense get clicked better. The tend to fill the space allotted instead of being hard to fit. I have even got comments from end users that they are better looking.