Google Testing ‘Blended’ Mobile Ads

Yesterday Google Operating System noticed that search ads were showing up between and amongst the organic content in mobile search results. I tried a variety of times this morning to reproduce those results and was unable to.

The ads I saw on Google mobile search results were all at the top or the bottom of the page (iPhone), which generally correspond to the ads on Google.com online results.

Google Operating System points to the query “love” (on the Opera Mini browser) as an example:

And when you scroll down, there’s the ad (“real text dating”) before the image results:

Again, other than this lone example, I couldn’t find another result where this ad presentation was offered. It must be an experiment that Google is running to see whether the “blended” ads affect CTRs and how users react to them. But because there’s so much scrolling to get to this ad, it’s effectively as though it were at the bottom of the page.

CTRs in mobile are generally going to be higher than online especially in the context of commercial queries.

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Update: After speaking with Google about this what was clarified for me is that Google isn’t doing anything new. On the Google WAP search experience the company has apparently always placed ads at the end of organic text results but before other types of content.