As an internet marketer, hearing the news that Google are abolishing the right hand side adverts to favor four adverts above organic search results instead of three came as a slight shock. Nobody really knows how this will effect PPC and organic traffic, if at all any. However, if you are still worried, there are a few things you can do to reduce the risks of your campaign not being in the right format to take advantage of such a change. Here are a few ways you can adapt your campaign based on Google removing the right hand side adverts from search results.

#1 Use Ad Extensions

With the introduction of another advert to be displayed for competitor keyword search phrases above organic search results, it is going to become harder to stand out from the crowd. Before, you were generally competing visually against two other adverts – now this has been increased to three. With this in mind, you will want to give your advert that bit more to make it stand out from the crowd – this can be done with ad extensions. As well as giving web users more information or contextual links to click onto, ad extensions crucially increases the area of space that your advert takes up. If you are familiar with the publisher side to PPC and Google Adsense, you will know that the most successful adverts are the largest. Therefore, if you make your search advert larger with ad extensions, there is a very strong chance the correlation of it becoming more successful will happen too.

#2 Re-Analyse Your Market

As far as we can go back, business has always had the same structure no matter what market and sector you are looking at: supply and demand. If there is a demand for something, supply it and you will generally make money. Making sure both are balanced is crucial to a low risk profit yielding business.

With the introduction of a fourth unit, the supply for ad space has increased (ignoring the fact the right hand side ad space has been removed – this is ignored since those who target the right hand side usually have different targeting methods to those that target above organic search results).

Therefore, it is a necessity to re-analyse your market to see if the competition was strong enough to make the supply change cause a change in PPC values such as the cost per click (CPC). You can do this by analysing how your actual PPC has changed as compared to the number of ad impressions and CTR of your advert.

Ultimately, I do not think internet marketers have to be too worried about the change implemented by Google. At the end of the day, the way Google make the vast majority of their profit is through PPC so they are unlikely to make a change that is going to hinder the performance of it to themselves or advertisers. I think, for this reason, the biggest losers will probably be organic search results, who have another advert above them to compete against above them.