Google Premium Testing
Google has been testing the color of the premium boxes on Adwords. This is the first time I have seen it.
The interesting thing to me is that in the screenshot, the yellow box looks clearly yellow.
However on my monitor, the yellow box on an actual search is only visible when you look at the screen from an angle. When you view the screen head-on the box is completely transparent and the three ads look like they could be natural results. Yes, the formatting is a little different, but I look at this stuff all day everyday and my initial thought when I found this was that this was a search without premium listings. I only noticed it because I walked away from my desk.
Is this an optical illusion? Are others seeing similar things? Is this an unintended consequence or a very specific color designed to appear transparently? Is it a chance outcome based upon my monitor settings, angle of the monitor, and lighting at my desk?
As an advertiser, I very much like being in the blue box, but I am somewhat concerned if people are being tricked into thinking that my ad is a natural result.
March 26th, 2007 at 10:31 am
Most people do not know the difference between a natural result or paid ads anyway.
March 26th, 2007 at 1:01 pm
I opened up Internet Explorer and saw this once on Saturday. I normally use Firefox and haven’t seen the yellow box since.
If thats showing up as white on your monitor I think you definately need to do some color configuration.
March 27th, 2007 at 9:18 am
Yea, we don’t have the nice UltraSharp dell monitors, we use the ones that if you tilt it or see it at an angle the colors darken or lighten :o)