AdWords ads now appearing at the bottom of search results

Over at Google HQ, the AdWords team are constantly testing and trialling new ways of displaying the AdWords search results – presumably in an effort to drive higher ad revenue while still delivering an good user experience. Examples of some recent changes are Location extensions, SiteLink extensions, and most recently the product extensions. Google now look to be rolling out a fresh test for the search results: AdWords ads at the bottom of the search results.

So what does this mean for advertisers?

To adverts appearing at the bottom of the page still look to be in their testing phase, so right now it is unclear whether this area of the search results will accommodate the same ads shown in positions 1-3, or simply shift ads from page 2 over onto the first page to increase the amount of ads shown. If the top ads are simply being re-shown, this will almost certainly have an impact on CTRs for these top ads as they’ll be getting double served.

If Google are making this change simply to increase the amount of advertisers shown on the first page, then this is very good news for advertisers who are aiming for low-positions with their adverts, and will result in significant CTR increases for ads in positions 10-12.

And for the organic results?

With more and more sponsored ads being displayed on the first page of Google, as well as new features (e.g. site links, location extensions) being added to the sponsored links to make them more appealing to browsers, the big losers here are organic advertisers. The first page of Google is now more competitive than ever, so those people with first page organic listings will need to make sure their meta titles and descriptions are as appealing as possible in order to ensure CTRs are at least maintained at their current levels.