Google has consistently operated as "do as I say, not as I do". They've rolled out these 4 ads above the fold off and on, in addition to Product Ads, and Hotel/Insurance comparison ads. Golden Rule: He who has the gold makes the rules.
It has the nice side effect of pushing down the organic results. On a 1440x900 screen, I see only 1 organic result above the fold for most "purchase intent" queries now.
It feels like there must be insane internal pressure to continue the double-digit percentage YoY gains in ad clicks.
It always felt disingenuous on Googles part to first display a paid ad for the site that I googled when the first organic result is also for that site. If i google for eBay, and i unknowingly click the first "result", why should eBay be charged a click through on that? Bull shit.
It is funny though, that for non-google properties, the advice is:
"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.
To be fair the side ads were the least noticed by me. There were times when I even confused the top ad with the actual search result.
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.
Also there are spam sites that are almost the same name as actual sites such airline tickets and concert venues. They manage to come on top of search results.
Also there are spam sites that are almost the same name as actual sites such airline tickets and concert venues. They manage to come on top of search results.
Here's one that's pretty sad. Even the "knowledge graph" entry points to something that's bad for consumers. No honest informational results until WAY after the fold.
I think that's just the nature of the query. Every single one of the first page of organic results for me is exactly the same: http://imgur.com/cypF0He
There seems to be a difference between a plain search for cmdb, and a search for cmdb and some other term, which makes sense to me. If searching for for just "cmdb", I think it's likely you are looking for information regarding CMDB systems, and possibly looking to purchase one (and even if not, often sales pages will do a good job of selling the main points of a product). When using an additional term, I would hazard you are generally looking for a more educational response about a specific aspect or problem, and the search results seem to reflect that with less ads.
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.
What makes them not useful services you would want to purchase and what would be your ideal search results?
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.
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.
On the 1st page of DDG the first organic result is to Vistaprint's homepage and then later down the page is a result for Vistaprint's business cards page. Duplicate search results for Zazzle, 123print, and overnightprints as well.
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.
Google ads seems to be useful/relevant when the best businesses in the sector are national, but crummy when the best ones are local. For instance, most folks want funeral homes that are locally owned (which is why lots of national organization pretend to be family owned). The ads returned when searching Google for "casket" are mostly useless link farms that try to pretend they are local.
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.
Google could make one change for smaller and new advertisers and have a dramatic uptick in retention.
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.
If you search for 'business cards' and get results of companies that make business cards that seems like a difficult thing to make a serious complaint about. Maybe you should try a more specific query?
Or y'know, I can use a search engine that actually surfaces results Google is now pushing to the second page.
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.
The problem is that almost universally the businesses that pay for keyword ads fall into two categories:
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.
I'm not entirely sure what you mean by #2, but I think you're number #1, combined with "universally the businesses that pay for keyword ads" is way, way, way, way off-base.
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.
Google's "page layout algorithm" is described by Google as penalizing content that has too many ads above the actual content. They don't give any credit for ad relevance.
So, they seem to understand the concept that excessive above the fold ads isn't a good idea for customers.
That's not the point. The more ads there are at the top, the more google is effectively allowing you to pay for good ranking. This violates a lot of the search neutrality that makes google so useful. I think of it like Yelp. I want the services other people like, that are relevant in some unbiased sense, not the ones that paid to get there. The harder google makes it to find unbiased info, the worse the service.
I can see at least these reasons why someone would search that phrase:
* 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?
I see the same thing for "business cards". On the other hand, a few other searches I tried ("android", "books", "facebook") returned 0 ads at all anywhere.
...and this is how Google opens itself to attack from a group that is ready to "disrupt" search. I, for one, love DuckDuckGo because my search results yield ...wait for it, search results! No, seriously, that's why I go there in the first place. To find stuff.
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.
Although I'm sure you're correct, this is a very short-sighted mentality, which I believe to be the downfall of most big corporations (short-term thinking).
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.
> 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.
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.
It's odd you would say that because, looking back, no search engine has ever been more precise or feature filled than altavista was.
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.
They don't know the difference between both because everything has been done to make no difference between them. Before they where pink, then they were white-ish, now they are completely white (like the results), now side ads are moved and pushed to the list of results along with the rest, which makes it even harder for average users to see a difference.
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.
How so? I don't see how Google could stop DuckDuckGo.
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.
Google is one of DDGs backends, and the highest quality one at that. DDG does not have its own crawlers or index. Nor could it: those things cost hundreds of millions of dollars per year to run and maintain.
[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]
Looks like my information is either out of date or was incorrect all along. Bing seems to be the primary source. They seem to also have a crawler now, though it's not clear how much it really covers. Very cool. Slow and steady wins the race.
I posted this elsewhere, but I didn't get an answer. Since you work you work for DDG, you might know.
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.
> Nor could it: those things cost hundreds of millions of dollars per year to run and maintain.
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.
Microsoft spends over $1B/yr on maintaining and improving Bing. So yeah, search does cost a fortune if you want to do it reasonably well without relying on others for results. Not only do you have to crawl the web (with different frequencies depending on predicted frequency of content update, etc), you then have to rebuild the index continuously, with reasonable latency. To do all of that, you have to have indexing infrastructure, which in turns requires storage infrastructure, high performanc data processing infrastructure (Hadoop ain't gonna do it, ask Yahoo as to why), which in turn requires high performance networking (or your mapreduce-like workloads will collapse under their own weight), your own datacenter, and your own army of machine learning researchers, systems engineers, hardware engineers, networking engineers, devops, quality engineers (people who improve your scoring function), human eval, etc, etc, etc. If anything, $1B/yr seems to be quite low.
> Microsoft spends over $1B/yr on maintaining and improving Bing. So yeah, search does cost a fortune
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.
Insane web traffic doesn't actually cost you much. Au contraire, my friend, it brings in the dough. What costs you money is the long tail, those deep, obscure searches which you have to answer to be perceived a worthwhile competitor to e.g. Google. To answer the long tail yourself you must have it in the index, which makes for a _very_ big index. And then you also have to figure out how to get the relevant results out of there in a hundred milliseconds (or 50ms if you're Google, and you have instant search), and update all that goodness to keep it fresh, so that it doesn't take three months for new pages to appear. If you think this wouldn't cost much to a startup, you don't know much about search.
And you don't need to doubt that figure, Microsoft discloses it in its financial results.
The difference, in my experience, is that clicking on the non-ad result takes me to the company's home (or product) page, which is what I wanted. On the other hand, clicking on the ad usually takes me through several dozen redirects and to some form of ad on the company's site, at which point I need to find a way to navigate to the product page.
The usability of ad clicks from Google is usually significantly worse than the organic results, even when they're the same company.
Title is a bit misleading. It should say that Google also adds a fourth line in the ads displayed above organic search results. The title makes it look like the only changes was the removal of the side ads.
The thing that's interesting is that quite frequently the site or page I am searching for shows up as an ad as well as an organic result.
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?
There is little net effect. Its discussed in detail above, but the brand pays very little when you search for "nike" and click on the top ad that is "nike.com" Google knows you were going there anyway, and their metrics support it, so cpc is low for Nike but would be insanely high for Adidas.
"It's a bug that you could rank highly in Google without buying ads, and Google is trying to fix the bug." (1)
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.
Now that you mention that, does anyone else find it incredibly scummy that Google shows ads for a company, leading to the company's website, above the first result, which is also the company's website when I search for something like the company name?
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").
You are correct and that is scummy and should happen, but you misinterpreted (the post is difficult to understand, I had to read it 2 or 3 times).
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!
Some SEO guy once told me companies decide to buy these ads because it costs essentially nothing (b/c CTR is almost 100%) and improves the advertisers quality score.
This is the correct answer. Metrics that determine cost for these specific ads are so high, that the cpc is very low. This also ensures competitors don't buy it out, but also allows a company to slightly alter the consumer's journey (by choosing the messaging in the ad).
Yep. It's trivially easy to buy on your own branded keywords (your relevancy is unmatched) and very cheap. Sure, you'll cannibalize some of your organic traffic, but the risk of a competitor advertising on your keywords is too great
Advertisers are in control of whether they show their ads for brand queries. Google has certainly been pushing for it, but there are many legit reasons for advertisers to bid on brand terms, even when they rank highly themselves.
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
Isn't a $200 sale from a free click better? (I see now that there are other arguments for running these ads, but this doesn't feel like a legitimate one to me, assuming you organically rank #1 for your brand.)
They might be trying to unify their product offering across desktop and mobile. This would mean less things they have to optimize for, therefore more money in the long run.
Depends. Google's AdWords account team want the maximum spend out of you, not best performance, so up that bid!
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.
Inevitable I guess because of mobile. I don't imagine it will be popular with their smaller advertisers though.
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.
I do paid search for a living, and it has been fascinating to watch the evolution of the SERPs.
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.
In my experience, Bing Ads are far more profitable than AdWords anyway. I don't know if it's an audience thing or if businesses ignore Bing altogether or underfund/manage it.
Depends on the audience as they have different demographics. Bing also has substantially lower volume, so can be a headache to manage separately without a bid management platform.
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.
It varies. I just did a search for "car insurance" on Bing and it was all ads above the fold (aside from the "Related Searches" block in the upper right). My point was more in following suit with the removal of the right siderail ads.
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.
Also I find interesting, and not mentioned in any Google news is they seem to be showing less (or zero) ads to more generic and low value searches E.g. Search 'Cat' vs. 'Credit Card'
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.
Maybe a generic work doesn't work for you but I've had great success with low value/competition KW's when they were more accessible via proper product, KW and ad copy selection. I wouldn't take this as a truism and believe there is more to it than your theory.
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.
There's a big difference between long-tail super-specific terms (that Google has increasingly been blocking due to "low search volume") and top-of-funnel generic queries, which for most are fairly low-quality comparatively.
They should just switch to showing nothing but ads in the first page of results and be done with it. I'm sure they will find a way to justify how this is "good for the users", but for me, with my widescreen laptop, the 4th ad will ruin usability even further.
Is there any info on how much a Google contributor subscription does or does not affect the ad placement for search results? I've been considering signing up for that so I don't see as many ads, and opening up Google ads in ublock, but multiple ads above results on the top of searches would quickly become unbearable.
Contributor will replace ads from AdSense (ads you see on independent publisher sites), not AdWords (ads on Google result pages). They're separate networks.
I suspected that might be the case, which is why I asked. That's unfortunate, but with further information it looks like the search result ads displayed is highly dependent on whether they think your search was commercial in nature, so I guess I'll see how much it affects me in practice.
This article was posted yesterday, heres my predictions:
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.
And what about user experience? It's times like these where I do not feel guilty about using an adblock, despite being a publisher myself, and hosting google ads on my website. Is it hypocritical? Probably. But I would think the issue isn't completely black and white.
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.
I'm in a similar spot and totally agree. Despite buying tons of ads and having adsense on my sites, I use adblock and other ad/script blocking extensions.
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.
They should rename "Google search" into "Google advertisement search". Since when I search on Google I just get ads above the fold. This is a slight inconvenience for me and but significant inconvenience for my mother in law.
I cannot judge whether this is good or bad from point of view of Google.
Okay, so let's search for...I dunno, 'crm' in a maximised google chrome browser on a 13" macbook pro: http://i.imgur.com/rT51tmt.png
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?
I've worked in paid search for some time now and can't help but chime in.
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
It's surprising google hasn't reduced the number organic listings from 10 to 7 or even lower on page 1. For alot of queries ad's are really better results. Google definitely has plans for all that new white space real estate.
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.
> For alot of queries ad's are really better results.
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.
4 ads on top for a search page, what a fucking joke. On a small screen you'd probably only see the ads before a single actual search result. This is pure greed and abuse of monopoly at this point.
On my search page, I just saw exactly one search result after 4 ads and a Google "summary" grid. And the first search result was spammy.
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.
I think this is more about competition from Amazon than other search engines. The focus on "commercial queries" tells me there's a mini death spiral of buyers going straight to Amazon to do those commercial searches. This will let them get in between more purchases short term but drive more users straight to Amazon long term.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 183 ms ] threadIt 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.
The change is only happening to people who are searching on google to buy something. It will not affect regular queries.
http://i.imgur.com/LsWwvZy.jpg
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
So, they seem to understand the concept that excessive above the fold ads isn't a good idea for customers.
* 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.
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.
Honestly, the only value Google has to me now is Google Apps because I like them better than Office365.
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
https://imgur.com/a/gY86r
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.
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.
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.
https://duckduckgo.com/traffic.html
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 usability of ad clicks from Google is usually significantly worse than the organic results, even when they're the same company.
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?
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!
I also use DDG as my primary and only resort to Google when absolutely necessary - and even then Google usually fails me too.
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
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.
(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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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"?
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.
- More users will install adblockers
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.
https://duckduckgo.com/traffic.html
I cannot judge whether this is good or bad from point of view of Google.
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?
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
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.
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.
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.