The ‘Bing-ification’ of Google marches ever forward and the little spyglass that showed up this morning in Google’s organic SERPs has a little side effect on ad placement:
(+ click image to enlarge)
If you’re in ad position 4+, you might as well not even be there when a user hits the spyglass.
Of course, this is likely just another test that may not ultimately stick, but they’ll have to do something about the impact on the right siderail ad visibility.
One more reason for Google to herd you into the top ad positions.
mmm, what’s the point of this preview then? You can’t actually see anything in it so you might as well just click through to the site anyway. If it showed you a preview of the actual content rather than the whole page it might be of use.
11.10.10 at 7:51 am
Let me update that… if it showed a better preview of the content it would be worthwhile.
It may also have the reverse effect on some ads though, where a page has a small preview the ads at the top of the siderail may actually be seen more than usual as the previews bring people’s eyes over to the right hand side.
11.10.10 at 8:00 am
I think your take on this Geordie, is scary accurate…I see it as they are trying to muscle you to spend more to avoid being covered by those useless previews. Hopefully, this one hits the bin.
11.10.10 at 5:58 pm
I agree with Jon. I usually totally ignore the siderail but find that once I close the preview, my eyes are drawn to the right hand ads.
11.10.10 at 8:39 pm
But don’t you guys think that the siderail is pretty pointless anyway? I never look at the right hand side of google results.
11.11.10 at 7:19 am
I agree with you there. The AdWords advertisers may get annoyed. and this is another reason.
the first was the Local Listing pushing down results. now this ‘stupid’ magnifying preview. Keep previews to Images.
🙂
11.21.10 at 11:23 pm