No More Ads Down the Right of Google

What changed late last week

Between Friday and Monday, Google stopped showing text ads down the right-hand side of its desktop search results.

Ads now appear in two places only: above the free results and below them.

On searches Google treats as highly commercial, where people are ready to buy, up to four ads can sit at the top instead of three. Up to three more appear at the bottom.

Shopping ads, the boxes with product photos and prices, are the exception and can still appear at the side.

Phones see no difference, since phone results never had a right-hand column. The change is on laptops and desktop computers.

Fewer places on the page

A page of results used to have room for up to eleven ads: three at the top and as many as eight down the side. Now it holds seven text ads at most.

The side was where small advertisers lived. A modest bid on a busy search rarely won the top, but it reliably bought a spot on the right, visible beside the results.

That spot is gone. An ad that would have been fifth or sixth now appears at the very bottom of the page, under the free results, or not at all.

The bottom of the page is seen only by people who scroll past the free results and, on local searches, the map.

Who notices first

• Advertisers with low bids, who sat at the side for years.
• Accounts on small daily budgets spread across many keywords.
• Businesses whose buyers search at work, on desktop computers.
• Free results near the top, now further down the page.
• Businesses in the map results, now under four ads on commercial searches.

The fourth affects businesses that have never advertised. On a commercial search on a laptop, four ads and the map can take up the entire first screen, and the first free result starts below it.

Where your ads appear now

AdWords can tell you. In the campaign and keyword reports, the Segment menu has an option called Top vs. Other, which splits impressions and clicks between the top of the page and everywhere else.

Until last week, Other on desktop mostly meant the side. From now on it means the bottom.

What decides the top four

Position is not bought by bid alone. Google ranks ads using the bid, the ad's quality, and the expected effect of extensions such as a phone number or extra links.

Quality comes mostly from relevance: how closely the ad matches the search, how often people click it, and whether the page it leads to delivers what the ad promised.

So the cheaper route to the top is usually narrower rather than richer: fewer keywords, ads that name the service and the town, and a landing page built for each.

A worked example

A security camera installer with two vans fits systems for homes and small shops across the suburbs east of the city. It ran a small AdWords campaign with modest bids and a fixed daily budget.

Most of its useful enquiries came from shop owners searching at work on desktop computers, and its ads usually sat on the right of the page.

Over the weekend they began appearing at the bottom instead, under the free results, and on some searches not at all.

The owner's first instinct was to raise every bid. The search terms report suggested otherwise: a good share of the clicks came from searches for cheap kits, single cameras and installer jobs, none of which led to installation work.

The budget had been spread across searches the business could never win. They had cost little at the side, and at the bottom they bought almost nothing.

The campaign was cut back to installation searches in the towns it serves, with kits and jobs as negative keywords. Bids went up on that shorter list, and the ads gained the town names and extensions.

Extensions take more of the page

With every visible ad now above or below the results, extensions do more work: a phone number, links to particular pages, short lines about the business, the address.

An ad with three extensions fills more of the screen than one without, and because extensions count toward an ad's rank, adding them can lift it without a higher bid.

For local businesses, the call extension matters most. Someone comparing options at a desk can see the number and pick up the office phone.

The free results have moved down

Four ads at the top, then the map with three businesses, then the first free result. On a laptop, that first free result can now sit below the first screen on many local commercial searches.

For a business that does not advertise, the map listing is now the first thing on the page it can earn without paying. Its hours, categories, photos and reviews matter more than they did a week ago.

The free results still get clicks, especially from people who skip ads on principle. But the first screen now belongs mostly to ads and the map.

What to avoid for now

Do not raise every bid at once. That pays more for the same searches, including the ones that never bring work.

Do not pause the campaign because a few days look odd. Judge it over a few weeks: every competitor is adjusting at the same time, and the picture will settle.

And do not assume the bottom of the page is worthless. Some advertisers will find it cheap and still worthwhile, which is a question for your own figures.

The counter-case

Plenty of advertisers will notice little. Businesses whose customers search mostly on phones saw no change, and those already in the top three simply gained a fourth neighbour.

Searches for your own business name still show your ad at the top, since nobody else is as relevant to them.

And on less commercial searches, where Google shows fewer ads, small budgets may still reach the top much as before.

For everyone else the advice holds: find out where your ads appear now, and spend on the searches where you can win a place at the top.

Cut first, then bid

1. Segment your campaign by Top vs. Other.
2. Read the search terms from the last month.
3. Cut searches that never bring work.
4. Raise bids on the searches that do.
5. Add call, location and sitelink extensions.
6. Name your towns in the ad text.
7. Complete your Google My Business listing.

Step three is what pays for the rest. Money released from searches that never brought work is what lets the remaining ads compete for the top four.

What decides which three businesses appear in the map just below those ads is covered in three places in the map results instead of seven.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.