A recent announcement from Google brings the news that they have shaken up the way they are displaying their paid search engine results.
Last week Google announced that they have removed the right hand side bar of adverts that are displayed on their search engine results pages and will instead be offering only 3 advert spaces at the top SERPs.
In cases where the keyword is “highly commercial” there will be 4 adverts displayed. Despite the search engine giant removing side bar adverts they will still be featured at the bottom of results pages.
Google has been trialling this Adwords change for the past few months, trying out the fewer number of ads on specific keywords however as of Friday 19th February 2016 they have rolled out the change across all searches.
Google also explained in their announcement that the free space will now be used for Product Listing Ads and also Knowledge Graph Boxes, which should not affect the user’s experience too much.
It is thought that the major search engine is implementing this change in order to bring the desktop user’s experience closer to mobile however it is not clear how many adverts will be displayed on the mobile version of the website.
Some experts believe that the change will not impact on PPC campaigns too much, as the side bar adverts had a very low click-through-rate in comparison to the top 3 results.
However obviously the change does mean that highly competitive keywords will see a rapid increase in the cost-per-click which could affect the budget for competitive industries.
PPC specialists are now advising that the focus should now be on increasing advert quality in order to reach the top adwords spots.
It is also believed that there will be a shift in focus onto organic search engine results, it is thought that moving forward most efforts will be put into search engine optimisation results over PPC adverts.
As the paid search engine results will be becoming even more competitive search experts have predicted that there will be more of a focus on organic campaigns, which do not come with an ever increasing CPC.
Any change within search engine results algorithms can have an impact on how well your website ranks on search engines and with Google constantly evolving this is not the first time that marketing specialists have had to review their strategies.
For more information on how we can help you to optimise both your PPC and SEO campaigns
fill in the contact form below and a member of our marketing team will be in touch.
Our professional team are ready and waiting to hear from you. We provide no-obligation quotes, so there is no pressure when speaking to our team.
Simply fill in our contact form and we will be in touch as soon as possible!