Google has been messing around with AdWords ads on search results a bit this week. Earlier this week, you may have started noticing that the ads have been pushed into the left, making for results pages feeling a bit more compact.
Presumably, the move was to inspire more clicks. The sponsored results are now closer to the organic results, and may be noticed by searchers a little more. The growing adoption of wider screens may also play a role.
In addition to this change, Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable points to a WebmasterWorld thread, where someone noticed a new form of ad that shows a product image at the top right area above the regular AdWords ads. He provides the following screenshot:
“At Google, we’re constantly experimenting with new features, tools and visual representations to improve the user experience and usefulness of our ads,” the company told Schwartz when questioned about the ad. “In accordance with that philosophy, we’re planning a beta test to show richer product information in the ads for shopping-related queries. This test will only be visible to a small number of U.S. users.”
A keynote and Q&A with AdWords Business Product Management Director Nicholas Fox at the Search Engine Strategies conference in San Jose provided some additional details about what Google is doing with AdWords. The company is even looking at matching information about your product or service and automatically building ads based on crawling your site.
