Google Ads Auction Changes

Key Takeaways

In recent weeks, there's been discussions online about how Google has made some changes to their help articles that show that some advertisers could have their ads appear in two different places on a results page. Now, there's some discussion about whether this is really a change or not, but it's still important to understand what's going on and how it could impact you. So, in this video, let's talk about what's changing or not changing and how it could impact your accounts. Let's start by talking about what the specific changes are from Google. And the best way to do this is really just going to be to go through the help article that talks about the changes that were made. So let's go through this step by step. So in this top paragraph, Google is giving us an understanding of how the auction has always worked. When somebody searches on Google, Google always runs different auctions for each of these sections of the results page that you could show up on. whether it's the top portion, the side rail, or the bottom portion of the results page. And until now, search ads from a given advertiser were usually restricted to one location on the page. So either you would show up at the top, on the side, or at the bottom. So, as they're analyzing user behavior on the Google results page, what they found is that searchers would typically search for something, review the content at the top of the page, scroll further down the page, and then when they were ready to take action, they would scroll back up to the top of the page where by the standards of Google, the more relevant listings would be shown. And this third paragraph is where we get into the actual change that is happening. They're trying to reduce the friction of people scrolling back up to the top of the page. So now they're going to allow the relevant search ads from advertisers who showed in the top ads to also participate in the auction for the bottom portion of the page. So in theory, somebody could have their ad show up at the top of the page and the bottom of the page. Now, one big distinction around this is that it does not say that your ad will show at the bottom of the page. What it says is that advertisers who are shown at the top of the page are now eligible to enter the auction for the bottom of the page. This is a pretty big note because you still have to win the auction for your ad to show in the bottom placement. You're not simply guaranteed a spot because you won the top placement on the site. Now, they've got some performance metrics here, all this sort of thing, and I'm not really too worried about those. But what I do want to do is show you what this looks like in the wild before we start to go through anything else. I've got a couple of examples here that are hitting pretty close to home. I need to replace a roof. So, I just typed in replace my roof. We've got some service ads up here at the top, but then you can see here in this sponsored section, we have Charter Exteriors, and then we have West Michigan roofing. So these two are showing up at the top of the page. This is considered the top of the SER. If we scroll down to the bottom, you can see here that we still have Charter Exteriors, West Michigan roofing, but now we have a third option down below, equityroofs.com. So basically, Charter Exteriors and West Michigan roofing qualified to be at the top and the bottom of the results page because of how relevant their ads were seen to be by Google. and equity roofs, even though it did not win a space at the top of the page, did end up showing up at the bottom of the page. Now, in a second effort, we just had a power outage that lasted multiple days. So, we're thinking about getting a generator for the house to help keep the lights on, literally, while the service crews are working on things. I just searched backup generators for homes. Here you can see GenerRack Power Systems shows up in the sponsored section below the product ads. And I'm showing you a second example because I want you to pay attention to what the ad creative is. Right now, there's one headline. It says special offer and free quote. There's some pieces down below, image, and some site links. If we scroll down to the bottom of the page, you can now see that the ads for Generrack have shown down at the bottom, but the ad unit itself is different. So, based on Google's calculations, the ad that was shown at the top had the best ad rank to be in that placement. And down below, they ran a second auction that was different. Came up with a different set of headlines, descriptions, and anything else. There's no image asset that's located here. And then this ad was considered the most relevant for this placement. So even though the company showed up twice at the top and the bottom of the page, doesn't mean that the same ad creative is going to show in each placement. It's still a separate auction that is going to have separate results. So now I just want to go through a number of the questions that Google has down here because I think they're probably the questions that you have and a lot of them are certainly the questions that I had. So the first one is the most obvious. Is Google changing its policy around double serving for ads? Short answer is no. There's a longer form answer that's in here, but the gist of this is that because Google is running a separate auction for the top results and the bottom results and a single advertiser cannot show up within the top ads twice or within the bottom ads twice. They're considering this not a violation of the double serving policy because a new auction was run, you won, that's why you get to show up. Does this have any other changes to the search ads auction? Not really. Everything else is effectively staying the same. All of the auctions are going to function the same as they always had. There's just going to be a different set of companies that qualify for those bottom of page auctions now that the ones from the top of the page are going to be added into them as well. We already addressed this next one. Will the same ad always appear at the top and bottom of the page? No. They're going to show whatever wins the auction and is considered the most relevant. And then pretty similar to question number two is does this change or loosen the query matching or ad load constraints? No, everything is going to function exactly the same. There's just going to be two different auctions for the top and the bottom of the page and a new set of advertisers will now be eligible for the bottom. Now the next couple of questions around impact of this change and preparing for this change, we're going to hop into the interface and some slides to talk about those. So let's start off with the first one. How do I understand the impact of this change? I'm in one of our client accounts and I've got the date range starting at the beginning of this year up until this week in the Google Ads interface. The way you can see where your ad was shown on the search results page is to click segment and then click top verse other. And now we'll focus just on this top campaign so I don't have to blur out too much. But now you can see what the performance was for our ads when we showed in the top portion of the results page and when we showed in the other portion of the results page. Basically meaning this top line is going to be when we showed above or adjacent to the organic listings. So being at the very top of the page or what we used to call average positions 1 through 4 if you will. And then also the right-h hand rail. Those are considered also the same portion of the top of the page since they do show up at the top of the page. And then this other section is going to be the equivalent of showing up at the bottom of the page. What were the stats when your ads were down there? Now, I already have the chart up here filtered for impressions. And since we have the report segmented by top verse other, the chart is going to reflect those numbers. So, the best way I've been able to illustrate the impact that this is having, check out the difference between the blue and the red line here. The blue line being Google search top impressions and the red line being Google search other impressions. week overw week. You can see that the blue line is above the red line and we're in the, you know, 20,000, 18,000, 13,000 range for all of these. And then starting the week of the announcement, April 21st, we see the other placement have slightly more impressions than the top placement. And then that trend continues after that date. So obviously, we've gained a lot of impressions in that other placement. And that's probably because our ads are now eligible to show on the bottom of the page. So, let's take this announcement date, April 21st. We'll go through May 22nd. I want to compare the data. We'll click apply. And now, rather than looking at an individual campaign, I'm just going to scroll all the way down to the bottom, and we're going to look at the account level stats. In this account, we only have search campaigns running. You can tell that just by looking at this line. There's no other campaign types. So this aggregate line at the top kind of all these things in here are going to be where we end up looking at performance. So here we can see impressions for the other placement increased by 40 almost 41% over these time periods. So before and after this change clicks went up by 7% but the click-through rate went down quite a bit. If we scroll over a bit here we can see that the cost was relatively stable. only increased by about 2%, but conversions in this area were down 25% and cost per conversion was up about 37%. So, while that might not seem great, we can't ignore the fact that the overall account had an increase in conversions of about 6% and cost per conversion went down just a touch, about 1%. So even though the other line isn't performing as well as it did, there could be a case to make that it actually improves the performance of the top placement of the ads. I don't know how scientific that is. This is just one account. But this is how you would analyze the impact that this change is having on your paid search accounts and Google ads. Now because of all that, you might think, okay, great. I can see the stats. I understand what the impacts are. What can I do about it? And here's the thing. You can't do much. This is a permanent change that Google has made. It's outside of your control and we're not able to tell Google which auctions we want to enter into, opt out of, anything like that, aside from all of our targeting options that we add in the channel. And unfortunately, search result placement is not one of those. So, here are the things I recommend you do based on this change. First, monitor the performance of your accounts. You might start to have some questions from your clients or your boss to ask what the impact of this change is or why they're seeing different results than they used to. Remember, the click-through rate in that placement went down quite a bit after getting a lot more impressions. So, they might start to notice the click-through rates on your ads are going down. But the question is, is that because something is categorically different and less resonant in your ads, or is it simply because you're showing up a lot more at the bottom of the page? From there, make sure that you optimize your campaigns as normal. Try to get the best results that you possibly can and always create highly relevant ads to appear for your entire account, but also because now you'll be eligible with those ads to show up in the top placement and potentially the bottom placement if you win both of the auctions. So, overall, this change from Google is not earthshattering, but it will have an impact on your performance metrics just like we saw in our example account earlier. Hopefully this rundown helps you understand what the change is going to be for the results page auctions and you'll be able to interpret that data easily. But if you have any other questions about this change or anything else in the Google Ads environment, let us know in the comments below. Thanks for watching our video. We really appreciate it. If you liked it, give us a thumbs up below. If you really liked it, maybe think about subscribing to the Paid Media Pros YouTube channel and you'll get alerted every time a new video drops. If you really really liked it, you can help support the channel by checking out some of the t-shirts that we're wearing on our merch shelf, as well as looking at the super thanks button.