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Dealing With Google’s Love For Paid Ads

Paid advertisements benefit Google massively, and the search giant loves them. This is leading to a significant increase in their prominence which is bringing along a few issues for marketers and webmasters. So just why does Google love paid ads so much and what issues does this cause for us marketers and business owners?

Why Does Google Love Paid Ads?

Every year Google makes billions of dollars, and almost all of the money they make comes from paid advertising – making apparent why paid ads are so important to Google.  To put into perspective just how much it makes from ads, Google made $17.3 billion in revenue in the first quarter of 2015, and $15.5 billion of it came from paid advertising.

Google primarily uses its advertising networks to bring in this money. Figures show how much it relies on third-party advertisers, with only $12 million of the total $15.5 billion revenue being made on Google’s own sites and the rest being derived from its various advertising networks.

When you see the figures it becomes quite clear why Google loves paid ads, but what issues can this cause for marketers and webmasters?

The Issues Caused By Google’s Love For Paid Ads

With so much focus from Google on how much it cares about providing the best user experience possible, it’s easy to ignore the fact that it isn’t a public service. Google is a for-profit company and although it does look to provide a great user experience for everyone, it does so to keep its number one spot and make as much of a turnover as possible.

With Google’s need for advertising revenue come a few issues for us marketers and webmasters.

Page One Paid Ads Increased To Four

In 2016, Google increased the amount of paid ads shown on the first page of search results to four. This is beneficial if you are interested in featuring your site in an ad snippet, but it affects organic search negatively, pushing featured snippets and organic results down even lower – in some cases causing organic results to start below the fold.

The Introduction OF Expanded Text Ads

Google wants more and more businesses to adopt paid advertising into their marketing, as it means more revenue for Google, so they’ve brought out features that make paid ads more desirable. Expanded Text Ads (ETAs) have been launched to allow businesses to feature more text in their ad snippets. This has helped to drive ad growth, but it also – much like the introduction of a fourth paid ad – pushes organic results down on the page, and has contributed towards lowering the average amount of organic results on page 1 from 10 to 8.5.

Ad Labels Are Disappearing

Google is slowly starting to remove the ‘Ad’ label from paid advert snippets, which makes paid ads look more like organic snippets. This has a negative effect on organic search as searchers won’t tell the difference between ads and organic sites, and think that the top four results are organic. So even searchers who usually skip paid ads may be fooled into clicking one of the paid ads at the top. 

Limited Tool Usage Without A Reasonable Ad Budget

Google has put some massive restrictions on certain tools for marketers and webmasters who spend little to no money on paid search advertising. Google’s Keyword Planner tool is still accessible to all, but unless you have a reasonable ad spend data is so restricted that it is rendered practically useless. This affects pure SEO marketers massively, as they lose unrestricted access to one of the most important SEO tools and its data.

How Do You Deal With Google’s Love For Paid Ads?

So evidently, Google is slowly increasing the prominence of paid adverts, which is making it more difficult for organic search to perform as well as it once did. Although paid ads don’t affect results for all searches, they will make it more difficult for some organic search results to compete with paid ads. There are a few ways marketers and site owners can deal with Google’s love for paid ads and their increased prominence however:

Aim To Appear In Featured Snippets

By writing extremely high quality, informative content that has value for searchers you may have an extract of your content used in a featured snippet, which appears higher than any other organic search result. Featured snippets draw in a lot of traffic, so they’re a good place to aim for specific search queries.

Adopt Paid Adverts Into Your Marketing Strategy

This is what Google really wants you to do as it benefits them massively, but you should also consider that it will most likely benefit your own or your client’s site. Paid adverts are becoming more prominent, and are being made more attractive to draw in traffic. Google wants people to click on paid ads, so they are on your side when it comes to bringing you traffic increases.

Do you need help adopting paid search adverts into your marketing strategy? Or perhaps you are looking to improve your websites SEO value to combat the increased prominence in paid advertising?

Contact UC4 today to discuss your plans and our specialist online marketers will do everything they can to improve the performance of your online site and bring your business more sales.