A Google Ad for Google AdWords with a Google Ad Tag. So meta.
With the many changes Google rolls out to AdWords, the latest update takes place for the search engine results page on desktops, engineering a facelift to the way users see ads. In the past, Google has tried many ways to have the ads naturally blend with organic and maps listings, images or products in the context of universal results- but at the same time maintained that users could distinguish what is a paid advertisement from non-paid. The new roll-out mirrors a change that showed up on mobile devices back in September.
The last round of edits may have spawned from pressure applied by the FTC in June regarding the clear differentiation of paid ads from natural results. As you can see below, Google has now dropped the subtle background color, and added the bright yellow “Ad” box to all paid listings. It seems that the perception was that search engines are misleading users, but now is the result really all that different? The point is that an assessment for such a case is subjective. To User A, this might make it an obvious distinction, but to User B, perhaps not. And what about the ads on the right side of the page? Because there is no background color and no yellow label for each ad, are these even more misleading than before?
Regardless of how Google arrived at this as the new appearance of paid results, advertisers are encouraged to benchmark data before the switch (December 4, 2013), and compare to a new data set of CTR and conversion metrics.
What do you think- will your campaigns suffer or benefit from this change?