PPC User Experience

Annoying Ads or Helpful Search Tools?

Google’s mission is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally acceptable and useful.” This is a lofty goal to say the least and in order to accomplish it; Google encourages the online world to play by a certain set of rules. These rules exist to provide the most accurate and relevant information to users and they apply to sites seeking rankings in the organic search returns as well as to paying advertisers.

Search engines are in the business of relevance. Often times when people think of search engines and relevance they only think of organic rankings.  However search engines seek to create the best user experience not only in terms of organic search returns, but also when it comes to advertisers. Many people assume that just because the yellow shaded box is an Ad that it is automatically irrelevant to them. This is the tragedy of bad advertising and is something that good advertisers are forced to overcome.

Searchers get frustrated with annoying ads and advertisers are frustrated with ineffective pay per click campaigns.  Despite this, many advertisers still get overwhelmed by the constantly changing nature of PPC advertising.  It seems that Google makes all too frequent changes to the AdWords platform as well as to its expectations of advertisers. To some, the changes seem trivial and inconsequential. This is understandable because most advertisers tend to think from an individual or business perspective rather than in terms of what is most beneficial to searchers. Advertisers need to change their thinking towards searchers’ user experiences rather than short-term profitability and immediate gratification. The key to the longer-term success of pay per click advertising is tailoring campaigns to be as user friendly as possible.

Advertisers who recognize the importance of catering their pay per click campaigns to the searchers looking for their products or services stand to benefit in major ways. Those who see PPC as just another area where they can showcase their brand regardless of how useful it is to searchers are destined to fail. Adapting to AdWords changes will help to sway the perception of ads as annoying and shift opinions towards ads assisting the search process. Below are just a few of the hundreds of changes that Google has made to AdWords over the past year.

• AdWords Enhanced Campaigns
• Location and Time Based Bid Adjustments
• Remarketing Lists for Search Ads
• Dynamic Remarketing
• Flexible Bid Strategies
• Ad Extensions Impact on Ad Rank

Google’s constant changes to the AdWords platform and policies are done in order to improve the overall experience of the searcher. Many of these changes seem drastic, painful and sometimes pointless when they are first established, but they are important steps towards people viewing ads as useful and relevant additions to search engine results. This is particularly important as consumers shift more of their Internet usage to mobile devices.

As frustrating and time consuming as changes to the norm can be, we need to replace the common perspective that ads are annoying and irrelevant with the knowledge that they can be useful search tools that complement organic results.