A few months back Google released a statement that free organic listing received a slightly higher click through rate than PPC or paid ads.
Well, in Google’s 3rd quarter release conference call the tides seem to be turning. Google now reports that PPC ads now receive a significantly higher CTR than back in August. Here are a few of the reasons that Google claims are responsible for the increased CTR.
The biggest things, probably in order, or close to order, were the UI tweaks that we did for results pages. We changed the maximum width, decreasing the spacing between the search results and the right hand side ads on wide screen. With that it increased the click-through rate on the right hand side ads and I think we did that some time around the second week in August.
We also had some significant ad improvements like site links that basically allow additional links to categorize and deeper advertisers of a site, which you can see if you run a query on something like Chevy, you’ll see the Silverado, the Malibu, you will see more information there, which increased click-through rates.
We also did some more work on showing more goods at good ads and expanded match. But we don’t give a specific sense of exactly the percentage that that resulted in. The more significant of the changes occurred in mid-August.
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