I am sure that most of you have already noticed this but some of you are probably unaware or don’t really care. If you know anyone who isn’t really computer literate but still go on the internet for certain things (probably about 70% of people online) and have watched them on google you might have noticed that they click on the very first link that shows up in the results. This first link is usually an advert. I have watched my mum on many occasions look for something, click on the first link and then wonder why the content is not really what she was looking for. I have explained this to my mum but she is still getting used to navigating around to find what she wants and she forgets all the little bits such as sponsored ads etc. So how many companies are paying for clicks like this? I would take a good guess that most of the clicks on these very first sponsored links are done by people like this. Perhaps some advertising campaigns are setup for this but I can imagine that most are not.

The main crafty issue that I don’t like is when Google shows an ad for a company when they are the very first result in the rankings and they always place these ads in the top sponsored links section meaning that most people see what they were searching for so will click on it costing the company money for traffic they would have gotten anyway. I noticed this a while back but didn’t really give it much thought until I was creating a campaign for someone. The last search I completed was for iSale software on the mac. If it is still the same you will notice the first result is correct but the ad above is for the exact same link. Your telling me that Google could not automatically work this out? They could but won’t because I can imagine that a lot of their revenue is created by doing this. I don’t know if Google has something under the hood that will sort this out in the admin, but considering they are showing the ad in the first place I doubt it or else why show it?

I don’t know Google Adsense well enough yet to know if there is a way that you can create filters to get around this, but I would recommend companies to take a look into this so they can see how much money they might be paying for traffic they would have gotten for free. If you have analytics you may be able to see what the search result was in the same way normal referrals work but, any click from Adsense gets redirected through the google system (obviously) so perhaps they do not include the same meta information they normally would do. If this is the case you begin to get a better understanding why they are not doing this.

So what do I think Google should do?

Firstly – They should remove the first sponsored links that blend in so well with the search results. I think this ruins it to be honest. Its easy enough for me to ignore them but what about the majority of users who have no clue what they are and just click on them thinking that they are the results.. They get around this because they put on ‘sponsored links’ and it removes them of responsibility but they know that in the majority of cases people will click on them not really understanding what they are.

Secondly – They should stop putting paid ads in the results when you appear in the first few results of a page and the user should be able to specify exactly how they want this. They might say show my ad when I am not in the first result or in the first 10 results. It’s their money so they should have control over this functionality.