New School SEO Changes: Pt. 4, Paid Ads

When I told you last year about some of the crazy changes Google made to AdWords and their SERPs, we knew 2014 would be a very interesting year for Google paid advertising. And so far, it looks like we won’t be disappointed!

Continuing right along with our new approaches to SEO series, we’ve got some exciting news for all you Google paid advertisers OuT there!!

Big Ol’ Banners

Maybe you’ve noticed some big ol’ beautiful banner spread across your search results pages (if you haven’t, you will). Those are Google’s new banner ads that they’re test driving, and if they do well, you can expect to start seeing more of them AND start implementing them yourself. This is some prime real estate with major eye-draw, so you’ll really want to consider it once it’s out of beta.

Trick, PLAs!!

You may have also noticed a more significant (significanter?!) presence of the product listing ads, too. PLAs (as we call ’em in the biz) came storming onto the SERP scene and immediately started making impacts. In fact, according to WordStream, they’re taking over traditional PPCs as we speak (type?)!

Look for these to take an even bigger role this year by moving consistently to the middle/top of the SERPs, rather than the corner, for some BIG TIME conversions!!



Extended Extensions

Ad Extensions will matter more than ever this year. Google posted about this recently, letting us know they changed their algorithms for calculating Quality Score to add more emphasis to Ad Extensions. This should help your potential customers get more info about you quicker, which is great for getting more targeted leads. It also means people who aren’t willing to put in the time to improve theirs will get knocked, so now’s your chance to STEP. IT. UP.!!

Mobile Matters More

You saw in our last post in this series that mobile efforts will pay off huge dividends for you this year thanks to increased mobile search querying. It only makes sense that this would extend on to Google’s paid ads, too. As more and more people use mobile devices to search for info and start clicking on the more and more appealing ads, you’ll see mobile ads becoming more and more valuable.

I hope you’re ready to rethink your Google AdWords approaches this year – I know we are!!

What are your plans for changing your AdWords game in 2014?