This isn’t ground breaking news at all, but it’s funny how when you stare at the same thing every day you can instantly tell if something looks different. Today I just happened to be testing something in the USA (with US proxies), and in the UK, when I came across something I thought I should share. I finally got a glimpse of the new Google Adwords background noticed by Aaron Wall in October last year.

Over the years Google has constantly been looking at ways to increase clicks on paid search adverts. They’ve added more adverts, added micro-format data to make them stand out, and more recently, moved to a paid Google shopping model. All the while using split testing to see how they can increase advertising revenue. If you think about it, even a 0.1% increase in the CTR would return millions of dollars for the search giant.

Do you think that it would make a difference?

Will there be any ‘natural’ results left on page one for commercial terms?

I’ve had the following image ready to post for a while (thanks to Col Morley) I was going to save it for April fools day, but as it falls on a Bank Holiday this year I’m going to post it now:

Last year at ionSearch I heard many different conversations about competitive primary commercial terms such as car insurance, cheap flights, cheap holidays etc. And pretty much everyone was agreed that Google had only one thing on its mind: money. It’s not so long ago that Google bought the comparison site BeatThatQuote.com before shortly deciding to penalise it for breaking the rules and roll-out it’s new Google Advisor site with supporting comparison boxes in SERPs.

I was going to go through and post each one to show how they are targeting every single search term, but as you can probably guess this isn’t really necessary - as it’s all of them. Noticed the different colour background? From what I’ve heard people trust the information that they get from organic search results more than paid ones, so Google’s constant tinkering with the colour pallete isn’t really a surprise.