A surprising number of users can’t recognize Paid Ads in Google Search

[Acorn Newsbot]

Graham Charlton published an article on how many users can’t recognize a PPC ad in Google search. Now I remembered reading another article a few months back which Charlton referenced in his latest article. The latest findings show 55% of respondents did not know the difference between paid listings and organic listings. Check out the […]

The post A surprising number of users can’t recognize Paid Ads in Google Search appeared first on TheDomains.com.

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[Edwin]

I'm surprised it's not more. Google have made dozens and dozens of tweaks over the years, designed to blur the line between organic and paid results as much as they possibly can without attracting regulator attention (hasn't always worked, since they've been ordered to make changes a couple of times to distinguish their ads more)

And with the rise of mobile and tablets (and with them, apps) and the decline in the PC market (together with the general ever-simplification and dumbing down of technology) the average person online is probably less "web savvy" than they were a few years ago (even though overall there may be more web savvy folk, their proportion is declining as the overall number of people online shoots up and up).

 

[Admin]

Yes it's true, mind you it's never been easy doing SEO. Fighting Google, being effective whilst keeping within their guidelines. Google moving the goalposts, Panda, Penguin and increasing Ad penetration with less noticable marking of ads. I think the regulators have given up. The zero background shading is frankly taking the p1ss. Look at the subtle difference now...

 

[martin-s]

Frankly it's great news if you're any good at PPC

 

[Admin]

Frankly it's great news if you're any good at PPC

Mmm. To a point but it has become SO expensive. Productive organic SEO can provide a far better ROI

 

[martin-s]

In my experience it has never been cheaper. Not if you know what you're doing

 

[Edwin]

And that's where a good generic could still help by attracting more clicks because in PPC, unlike in SEO, there's no "weighting" being given (and more recently reduced) to exact match domains so the click effect is likely to keep working.

 

[ian]

Why would a general user visiting search results on Google care either way? For the most part they will click either the most relevant, or highest placed web site, i.e. top of the page; they don't care if it costs a company money for the click through or not. For those that need to know, I don't see why Google need to make it any clearer that the already clear green AD icon next to such advertisements.

 

[Murray]

@admin This is another summary of a summary on another site that links to the actual article

How does thedomains thing work, you've added their articles to a feed? you might as well just add clickz site directly atm

 

[Admin]

@admin This is another summary of a summary on another site that links to the actual article

How does thedomains thing work, you've added their articles to a feed? you might as well just add clickz site directly atm

Yes it is and whats wrong with that? The point of using thedomains feed and not clickz is that we will only get domain relevant news articles and this is a domain forum. I don't understand your query on this...

 

[Admin]

Also, yes I added a new feed yesterday (domainsherpa) and did an initial import so a few articles were pulled in instantly, that was a one off. I added thedomains feed a couple of weeks ago.