Update: Big Google News! More Ads at Top of Search Results. Higher CPC’s?
In February Google stopped showing text ads in the right column of its desktop search results. Instead they began adding another paid listing at the top of the search results.
Many search marketers predicted disaster. Some said CPC’s would skyrocket, “raise costs for advertisers; squeeze-out advertisers, and send many advertisers to Bing/Yahoo, FB and other social-media platforms.”
What effect has there been on CPC’s (Cost per Click charges for paid listings) so far?
In an article on Search Engine Land WordStream’s Larry Kim share’s what data his company has so far. Wordstream has about two thousand customers using its tools so they can compile meaningful data quickly.
In our original article we suggested that the net change of adding another paid listing at the top of the search results while removing the right side ads might be about a wash. Most experienced advertisers kept their most important keyword ads in the top 2 or 3 positions knowing that there were much less clicks from ads in the right column. We speculated that experienced advertisers would begin keeping their most important ads in the top 3 or 4 positions.
So Far Costs Per Click (CPC’s) Are Static
According to Larry Kim the sky hasn’t fallen as some predicted. CPCs haven’t jumped, let alone by 3x as some predicted. If anything, CPCs have gone down some according to WordStream’s data so far.
Read the full article on Search Engine Land for all the data on CPC’s as well as the effect reported so far on –
- Click-through rates (CTRs)
- Impressions & Traffic from Paid Listings
- Who Did Loose Because of the Change?
Read “Google’s right-side Apocalypse: What really happened”
on Search Engine Land