Google is reportedly showing its Local Service Ads more evenly. This means that previously, the same advertiser would often show up in the LSA spots in the Google Search results and remain there, but now it seems Google is bringing in a more diverse set of advertisers.
Joy Hawkins via Crystal Horton reported on her blog saying "Google is now rotating Ads more evenly." The first part about Google sometimes showing fewer LSA ads is something we covered in August but the part about the advertisers shown in those ads slots being more evenly distributed is new to me.
Joy wrote, "Google started rotating the ads a lot more. Previously, if you had a good account history, it was possible to completely dominate a market and make it really hard for new advertisers to get shown. That is no longer the case. To help illustrate what it looks like now, we set up a ranking report using Places Scout and had it scanned every hour for 4 days."
They looked at 124 repeated queries over 4 days and noticed that Google rotated 10 different advertisers in the LSA top spots.
Here is the chart they put together illustrating this:
This resulted in advertiser's LSA ad spend dropping from 80% to 20% across certain verticles and locations.
"This change also appears to have helped the smaller business. For advertisers who spent $1000 or less in August, we saw an overall increase of 25% in September. Overall, across all accounts, we saw spending go up by 5% in September," Joy wrote.
Did you notice this with your LSA campaigns?
Forum discussion at X.
