The adCenter blog announced that they have added a fourth ad to the top ad location in the Live Search results. This brings the number of search ads displayed on the page from 8 to 9, and pushes the organic search results down by one ad position.

Here is a screen shot of what you may see:

Why did they make this change? For the advertiser. The advertisers wanted more clicks and more exposure.

We’ve made this change in response to your feedback asking for more clicks for your ads – our test results show that displaying a fourth mainline ad, and also displaying the top two mainline ads again at the bottom of the page, increases clicks to these ads. Over the last several months we’ve been optimizing our paid search ad layouts to help drive increased revenue for your ads, and provide a positive search experience for users.

I believe Google shows a maximum of three ads at the top, Yahoo shows a maximum of four, while Ask.com shows as many as five search ads at the top.

It is nice that adCenter was upfront about this change.

Related Topics: Microsoft: adCenter

About The Author: Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here. For more background information on Barry, see his full bio over here. See more articles by Barry Schwartz