Google AdWords has removed righthand side ads and has now stepped up the priority for its new fourpack ads for “highly commercial” search terms. Here’s what it means for all of you digital marketers.
Customer Is King – The fourth paid ad position shows up for online search topics when there is a highly commercial inquiry. In other words, when a customer expresses a serious intention to purchase something with a query such as “buy smartphone” or “buy laptop,” the fourad pack is six times more likely to show up above the organic search results. Google wants to ensure that what content marketers create is relevant and trustworthy.
MicroMoments – 23% of all online search topics will yield itself for fourpack ads, and purchase intent searches are six times more likely to see a fourpack ad. Again, we can only emphasize the importance of paying attention to customer intention when developing search strategy based ads; such critical touch points in a customer’s journey are referred to as “micro moments.” Marketers need to pay attention to how a consumer is searching online, especially for keywords that express a desire to buy something, do something or go somewhere.
More Competition Between Advertisers – Organic search results are going to be pushed down the results page when there is an intent to purchase on display by the user. Studies indicate searches with a discovery intent have a 69% higher clickthroughrate for the top five search results. Since Google knows consumers don’t want to be bombarded with too many ads, the sidebar ads are no longer going to be on display.
For example, if one searches for “buy new laptop,” the new layout will display seven ads, unlike 11 ads as per the old layout. All of these changes, end up making the fourpack ad space highly coveted the number of ads on display have been reduced, and the importance of showing up in one of these limited ad spaces has gone up because people searching with an intent to purchase are actually very likely to click on such ad links.
How to Up Your Game – To up your advertising game, it is important to know which commercial terms have organic search results so you can merge both organic and paid search strategies to boost ROI for paid and organic marketing efforts. Research pages that are ranking for various terms and modify your web pages to map content as per what consumers are searching for. It is also important to see which search topics yield few ads, to develop content that is relevant and highquality to attract results organically. At the moment, search results have not been impacted by these ad changes for those who are not logged into their Google account or who are browsing in incognito mode, so you still have some time to do more research on your own.
