The search engine giant is officially killing off Ads that display on the right hand side of desktop search results. You may have already noticed that these Ads were slowly disappearing from the right side of the screen, and now the change is to be implemented worldwide over the next few weeks.
The decision to remove the ads from this part of the screen started back in 2010 when Google started running various tests. We’ve seen quite a few tweaks in our results pages since then as their developers figured out the best ad placement. Soon we will only see ads at the top or bottom of the page.
There are a few exceptions to this change, however. Product Listing Ad (PLA) boxes will either be placed above or to the right of search results. Ads in the Knowledge Panel will also be seen on the right side of desktop searches. A Google spokesperson also mentioned that the company was toying with the idea to ad a fourth ad above the search results for “highly commercial queries.”
Popular commercial queries include searching for hotels, plane tickets, car insurance and shopping. But it is important to note that this change will affect all search worldwide.
“We’ll continue to make tweaks, but this is designed for highly commercial queries where the layout is able to provide more relevant results for people searching and better performance for advertisers,” the spokesperson said.
Why might moving the ads strictly to the top and bottom of the search results page improve ad performance? To state the obvious, it’s because many users gravitate their gaze to the search results list and do not tend to glance towards the right hand side of the screen. The ads will also be hyper relevant to a user’s queries.
In order to succeed in getting the most from your AdWords campaign, it is highly recommended rewriting your Ads to cater towards more specific, long tailed searches. Always be sure to fill all the given characters for your Ads.