Ginny Marvin, the Google Ads Liaison, said that you may see a shift in Top/Absolute Top Impression rate and/or a change in overall CTR as a result of the double serving Google Ads experiment. This is where Google can show the same ads in different ad locations because it has different auctions for each ad location.
Greg Kohler asked Ginny Marvin on LinkedIn:
Does this mean the experiment is fully rolling out?Ginny Marvin has there been any official announcement from Google on this or how advertisers are supposed to look at their data differently? this seems like a massive change that has the potential to really impact a lot of reporting metrics. Impr, CTR, Impr Share.
That question was about three weeks ago and Ginny replied over this weekend saying:
Greg Kohler This doesn’t change the definition of impressions: An impression is counted each time your ad is shown on a search result page or other site on the Google Network. And just to reiterate, the auction has worked this way for many years. We are running an experiment that allows an advertiser to compete in the bottom auction even if they showed in the top ad location. You may see a shift in Top/Absolute Top Impression rate and/or a change in overall CTR as a result of this experiment.
She wrote again, "You may see a shift in Top/Absolute Top Impression rate and/or a change in overall CTR as a result of this experiment."
Let's not forget, Google Ads changed the definition of top ads as it continued to mix ads within organic results and then ran its double serving Google Ads experiment. With this, Google confirmed it does different auctions for each ad location.
So keep this in mind as you continue to see Google Ads double serve ads from the same advertiser.
Forum discussion at LinkedIn.
