Google AdWords Switching to 4 Ads on Top, None on Sidebar
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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.
Given people can pay up to ~$20 for a credit card click and more generic clicks are closer to $1, I wonder if they found if they pile ads on the high value KW's only they maximise profit whilst keeping the Google image 'we value organic search results' feeling by not showing ads in the low profit areas.
Like you I feel they are loosing credibility in this latest evolution. Its amazing to see how little, if any, real-estate organic results holds on a typical laptop screen. I kinda feel they are increasingly opening the door for competitors to step in on their cash cow. I personally have moved to give DuckDuck another go since this.
Removing ads wasn't a PR stunt. Hardly. It was simple math. Piss off enough advertisers and they leave. That's not PR. That's smart product dev.
If Google were truly worried about advertiser ROI they would better deal with all the bot clicks and generally dodgyness on the display network. Both easily done and they love to play dumb to a large extent on these.
I have no idea what your point is. "It is good product development to scare off the people who pay you money"?
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.
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.
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
(2) http://searchengineland.com/google-clarifies-no-ads-shouldnt...
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").
http://i.imgur.com/7ymtPjd.png (Search for "united airlines" and the top link on the page is for "alaska airlines")
What he's saying is that it is scummy to show an ad for unitedairlines.com when the second result is unitedairlines.com thus making the company spend money on the click but the user would click anyway, because the first would be unitedairlines.com even without the ad!
A couple off the top of my head:
- Helps push competitor's down that might bid on or rank organically for your brand term
- Gives you control over sitelinks (you have much less over organic sitelinks)
- Helps build account-level Quality Score which ultimately helps control CPCs account-wide
- Let's you control your message
- Let's you control your audience (such as by using RLSA to retarget to specific audiences, exclude others, etc.)
- Gain a MUCH deeper level of understanding on how people are searching for your brand in context with other touchpoints
- Gain some very good data on brand query volume and composition that could lead to other insights
The list goes on. There are definitely some cases where it isn't necessary or warranted though. However a savvy marketer will weigh the pros and cons and not make a snap judgement that "brand terms are bad" since they are often worth the minimal expense.
Source: Do this for a living and helped lead the paid search group at a top search agency
I also use DDG as my primary and only resort to Google when absolutely necessary - and even then Google usually fails me too.
You have super high relevancy with the ad. So the quality score is high and the actual price gets lowered a bit.
I also ran them defensively, since I did not want any other advertiser to have the #1 position.
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?
Google has forgotten why they were successful in the first place and has instead pushed monetization to the detriment of their flag ship product.
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.
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.
When I start seeing technical people, HN comments, etc. advocating for using Bing instead of Google, I'll believe this. I don't think it's ever gonna ever happen. Google's power users are, if anything, an even more captive and loyal audience than Joe Public, and they know it.
I'm sure altavista was guided by various metrics too, but those weren't the metrics that I as a search user found important.
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 ...
You are right that Google deciding to 'helpfully' remove terms from my search query is frustrating.
But yeah, I'm sure making ads look like results brings more clicks. The downside of that is Google basically becomes more and more unusable for queries directly generating money (like "buy <something>").
I think grand parent has a point. If someone wins the top spot for a certain keyword like "PayPal" it is probably because it is good enough to win it. Of course, there is probably more work needed there but if the add doesn't perform then no matter how much I bid the ad won't show up to people, at least not to many people.
some examples
Google needs to do more to prevent malicious vendors but at least things like this http://i.imgur.com/PTDcMsn.png are in the right direction.
Honestly, the only value Google has to me now is Google Apps because I like them better than Office365.
There are two trends: more overall internet users, and a growing subset of the users that never clicks on ads.
That leaves the users who can't tell the difference as the primary marketing target.
I think the number of ads a person attends to per day is an inverse predictor of intelligence.
Google is acting more and more Yahoo-like.
The usability of ad clicks from Google is usually significantly worse than the organic results, even when they're the same company.
It's not really relevant either, the two companies aren't really the same types of businesses. DDG is a very niche, and I doubt it would scale to the size of Google. Likewise Google have to make some compromises, that DDG will not, to finance it self.
[Edit: apparently this is not true. DDG does not use Google, though it does use Bing and some other broad and narrow coverage search engines]
How long would duckduckgo have to grow at its current rate to become an actual blip on Google's radar? On the one hand, you're small. On the other hand, keep up a fast growth rate long enough and you get bigger faster than people's intuitions' expect.
I vehemently disagree. The early web crawlers and indexes did not cost hundreds of millions of dollars to run. Granted, there is significantly less web results than there are today, but the cost you're referring too is the entirety of google's servers. That price tag also includes the cost to host the web traffic of being the number 1 website in the world. You're talking a price tag which is indicative of a final product.
A new search engine would not have those costs initially, and if managed properly from the very beginning, would be able to scale and cover their bills, remaining profitable up until reaching (and hypothetically) replacing google.
I doubt that figure, but even if it is true, you're still talking about a final product (not a new start up). It's a figure that includes things like marketing and insane web traffic. These are things that a new search engine would not have initially.
I'm not saying running a search engine is cheap. It's not. But the implication is that it's like the pharmaceutical industry where you need billions just to get in the game. It's not like that at all. In fact, there have been a few search engines which have tried to get in the game. Search engines like Cuil (anyone remember them?). They may have failed but that doesn't mean it's impossible. And it certainly doesn't take hundreds of millions of dollars to get started.
And you don't need to doubt that figure, Microsoft discloses it in its financial results.
The change is only happening to people who are searching on google to buy something. It will not affect regular queries.
If ads are displayed more for people that are possible looking to buy something, and less for people who are not, then I think that's a net win, if done correctly. We'll see how it plays out in practice.
* They want to buy business cards
* They want more information on what business cards are.
* They want an image of a business card to use as a reference
Arguably the results for business cards are actually quite relevant, since someone searching for them probably wants to buy them. Maybe Wikipedia could be up there to satisfy #2.
Plus, the organic search results are essentially ads. Is the search quality actually improved by you seeing Vistaprint's organic search ad instead of their Adwords ad?
Circled the only real responses. I don't exactly have a low resolution monitor either. I can only imagine it's worse on an older laptop.
So, they seem to understand the concept that excessive above the fold ads isn't a good idea for customers.
Useful services I'd like to purchase? Fuck no.
I'm not even bothering with !g anymore.
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.
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.
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.
2) GotPrint [ ditto ]
3) NextDayFlyers [ Never tried them but a friend has and told me they were awful. ]
4) SirSpeedy [ Never heard of them, but given how terrible their landing page looks and the fact its a Request a Quote - http://www.ppc.sirspeedy.com/printing?sfranid=SSI01470&kw=bu... yeh, sorry not touching that ]
After that comes the map
Then VistaPrint again.
Moo, Staples don't come up until I've hit page down a couple times.
Uprinting is on the second page.
---
DDG?
Vistaprint, Gotprint (Ads) that are relatively subtle and don't consume a little over a page worth of real estate.
About 50% of the places on the first page are useful results. [e.g. Uprinting is on the first page, Moo is visible without having to hit page down twice]
It also includes the company which we actually got our business cards for $DayJob.
I understand that you've not found Google's paid results to be high quality and that they take up a lot of real estate, but they are definitely relevant and their organic results are more distilled and better than DDG.
That said, I'm much more easily influenced when someone I know and trust tells me about a service they've used personally and vouched for, which was how I found Moo for business cards.
That doesn't make any sense to me but okay, its your worldview.
I'm sorry but the fact I basically have to hit page down 1-2 times to get useful results on Google gives me basically the same problem I have with DDG. [e.g. The first couple results are useless]
The difference with DDG is I can usually find it after skimming the page. Now with Google I have to hit Page Down -> Scan, probably hit it again.
Google has completely destroyed the value proposition for my use case.
1. Complete shit or obvious scams.
2. A copy of the 1st or 2nd organic result.
I don't know what can be done about this from a business perspective but when an ad blocker about doubles the usefulness of a search engine it's a tough sell to get me to turn it off.
Of course shit and scams surface in search ads because Google doesn't do a good enough job of policing them, but they aren't completely ignoring the issue either. Ultimately, you're not buying ads to lose money and making high-intent keywords cost A LOT of money per click, so it's hard to play the game if you're not producing sales from it.
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.
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.
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.
Long tail keywords don't even work because if a keyword is long enough on the tail, it doesn't get a high enough quality score and you either never display your ad ("disabled due to low quality") or you have to pay out the nose to display it.
Either way, it doesn't work.
- More users will install adblockers
(source: Google's AdWords account team)
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.
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?
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.
It feels like there must be insane internal pressure to continue the double-digit percentage YoY gains in ad clicks.
This isn't adsense, so they don't really need to follow those rules (and wouldn't need to anyway because they are the rulemakers).
But even aside from that, in a way they just made a current "block" of ads larger.
"This algorithmic change...affects sites that go much further to load the top of the page with ads to an excessive degree or that make it hard to find the actual original content on the page."
If you equate "the organic results" with "original content", the irony is thick.
Yet I can see the other side of the coin -- that they are right to downrank others for this (or at least: that it is a useful heuristic for judging other websites), even while at the same time they are right to frontload ads on their own results pages. Their best research probably suggests they should lay it out this way, as has been said elsewhere in the discussion.
Nevertheless, I personally downranked Google Search about 6 years ago, when I could see how far it was already from any idealized concept I had of it, as a (reliable, objective) library-style index search program for internet pages, which would just report back things honestly, like a database query.
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.
I cannot judge whether this is good or bad from point of view of Google.
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
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.
The other consideration here is that last year Google announced that mobile queries had surpassed desktop, so the overall impact to advertisers is actually going to be smaller than they think.
Limiting the number of traditional paid search ads is the only way Google can continue to maintain a balance between SEO & paid search while enabling them to test new products/paid ad formats. Think integrated voice results, video results, etc.
Google can only maintain its market position as a business if they continue to deliver the best search experience. And to do this, they need to continually improve their search product.
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.
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.
The real question is: What took them so long to do this?