Over the past few months, we've been seeing glimpses of the green "Ad" label next to Google paid ads on both mobile and desktop:
Previously this has been a yellow label:
Ads showing with green labels have been showing more frequently in the past weeks, and Google have now confirmed that they will be rolling out these new labels globally, across all devices. This week Google released the following statement to Search Engine Land:
"“We regularly test ways to improve the look and feel of our search results page. We’ve been experimenting with a green search ad label and have decided to roll it out based on positive feedback from users and advertisers. Our goal is to make our results page easy to use, and our labeling clear and prominent,” a Google spokesperson told Search Engine Land."
There is always the question of why Google introduced this change in colour. The green, now the same colour as the display URL, could potentially be seen to make it harder to distinguish paid ads from organic listings at a quick glance. However, Google have noted that their ad labels are still clearer than other platform ad labels, and that through testing they found the change in colour to have no impact on how easy it was to distinguish a paid ad from an organic listing.
