More See Horizontal Look For Top Three Google Ads

Jan 14, 2011 at 1:48pm ET by Pamela Parker

Reports keep coming in that Google is testing a new format for its top three ads. The new format — in which the headline is combined with the first description line, or the two description lines are combined — has been spotted as far afield as the United Kingdom.

The effect, some have suggested, makes the top content-column ads look more like the organic search results below, in that they stretch out further to the right.

Google isn’t commenting beyond its usual response to tests seen in the wild. “We are always experimenting with the look and feel of our search result pages, including the delivery of relevant advertising,” spokesperson Jim Prosser told me when I inquired about the widely-seen test.

The company continually tries different displays in an effort to boost click-through rates. It recently changed the way it shows the domain portion of the URL in its AdWords ads, so that the domain is consistently lower case. In announcing that change, the company said it helped improve many of its metrics, including click-through rate.

Hat tip to John Ellis and Emma Chun for passing along news of this.

Related Topics: Channel: SEM | Google: AdWords

About The Author: Pamela Parker is a contributing editor for Search Engine Land and Executive Features Editor at Marketing Land. She’s a well-respected authority on digital marketing, having reported and written on the subject since 1998, including a stint as managing editor of ClickZ. She’s also worked to help monetize independent publishers’ sites at Federated Media Publishing. She blogs about media and marketing at The River and about cooking, gardening and parenthood at Free Range. She can be found on Twitter as @pamelaparker. See more articles by Pamela Parker

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russellosullivan

Developing display to look more like organic results may help on the delivery of relevant ads, but I can’t help but feel that there would be too little on distinguishing between the both and therefore lead to move revenue to Google via users clicking on sponsored ads.
Mark Oliver

I noticed this today on our UK results and enquired about it. Basically if your ads appear in the top 3 positions on Google and have a description line 1 that ends in punctuation, your ad will appear in the new format.

Another effort to make advertisers pay more for a top 3 position perhaps.