AdWords Eliminates Right Side Ads and the Sky Doesn't Fall in

As of February 2016, advertisers noticed that AdWords ads were no longer located on the right side of the desktop SERPs, instead only being shown on the top and bottom of the results pages. When Google confirmed the change marketers were quick to decry the move as disastrous. Less ad space would lead to outrageous CPC, less traffic and be particularly damaging for small business advertisers.

A month in, and the people over at SearchEngineLand crunched the data to find out how bad the repercussions of the change actually were. And the results? Not bad. They determined that with 7 instead of 11 ads being show there's less competition for clicks so CTRs are up. CPC and traffic have remained pretty close to the same with only Ad Impressions seeing a decrease. They went further to look at what happened to those 8-11 ad spot holders and they were unable to find any that were completely crushed by the change. You can read their full report here.