I’ve been involved in a number of usability testing projects in Ireland over the last year, for a range of commercial and government clients. Without exception, for every usability test participant, Google was their search engine of choice.

Google AdWords on the right of search results are ignored

All but one of our test participants did not click on the sponsored links and when asked, in about 90% of cases, they stated they would never click on the AdWords or “Sponsored links” on the right hand side of the page. When asked why, the main reason given was because they were ads. One participant commented,

I never click there, that’s all junk

Another told us,

I hate those ads, I ignore them.

Sponsored links above organic results look and behave like organic results

Most usability test participants clicked on the sponsored links above the organic listings without any hesitation.

This observation is similar to those outlined in Jakob Nielsen’s recent post on banner blindness where he writes “Users almost never look at anything that looks like an advertisement, whether or not it’s actually an ad” and “the more an ad looks like a native site component, the more users will look at it”.

So, the sponsored ads above the organic search results resemble organic results and the the ones on the right hand side do not. Why?

I think it could be because of the amount of white space between the sponsored links and the organic results.

Let’s have a look at some web analytics data specific to screen resolution. This data is from the iQ Content website, though I have seen similar trends for some of our clients’ websites too:

• 800×600 continues to fall (down from 9% to 3.6%) and 1024×768 is falling too(down from 54% to 38%) are on the wane
• Larger screen resolutions are on the increase.

Nothing new there: screen resolutions have been increasing over a number of years.

The visual space between organic search results and sponsored ads (to the right of the results) has increased too. Does this visual separation result in Google’s sponsored ads behaving more like “normal” ads i.e. those that users mostly ignore?

Below, screenshots from 800×600, 1024×768 and 1280×940 respectively (click to see uncropped screenshots).

Obviously, this theory would need to be more rigorously tested. If I were to do so:

• I’d do some qualitative usability testing to look at Adword click-throughs with different screen resolutions.
• I’d compare the above qualitative data to more quantitative analytics data to see click-throughs over a longer period, perhaps over 3-4 years to see if there really is a correlation between increasing screen resolution and a decrease in AdWords performance.
• I’d test different Adword layouts to see how click-throughs were affected, either qualitatively with users or by analysing A/B test data.

What if I’m right?

If I’m right, then Google may need to do one of two things:

1. Redesign the layout of their search results page so that increased screen resolutions or browser viewing panes do not stretch the whitespace between search results and sponsored links on the right.
2. They may need to design their search results to be more like Ask.com’s where sponsored ads appear above and below search results.