Google PPC ads misunderstood by users as the most relevant search result
It was a shock during our usability test with 7 users to see 4 of them select the top sponsored link as the most relevant result when carrying out a Google search. They didn’t notice the difference of styling that distinguished these one or two special results from the organic ones below. The pale yellow shaded box with label in the top right didn’t do it’s job.
In hind sight maybe it wasn’t such a revelation why these users couldn’t see the difference in style. After all they followed quite typical behaviour by focusing on this middle column, the part of the website that everyone knows contains the most useful information. Interestingly these same users did understand the right hand column to contain advertising.
Whilst Google is naughty in the placement and all too subtle styling of these centre column PPC ads, they are no where near as bad as ASK and MSN. I think their SERPs are tantamount to those old pop-up ads that tricked the user into clicking fake window alert boxes. Why would anyone use them? Just hope that Google doesn’t follow suit. Although, hold on, Google started it!
Can you see the difference between paid advertising and organic search results on this Ask.com results page? To make matters worse, there are even more ads at the bottom.