A lot of people really don’t know that Google contains advertisements

We recently published some findings on Econsultancy that showed that about 36% of people may not realise that they are clicking on Ads when they select the top listings on Google’s result pages, and further more that a surprising number 27% didn’t realise that Google carried any ads at all.
Intrigued by our findings gained from face to face user research using eyetracking, Econsultancy together with a partner launched a survey of 2000 people which found that 10% of people say they have never seen an ad on Google.
It is good to see this independent validation of our results, and in fact we are rather surprised that their result is so high given that four of the questions they asked in the survey implied that there were ads on Google (rather giving the game away).
A nice revenue earner for Google and a potential brand building exercise for those brands paying to be at the top? Ideally of course the design should be such that people really do understand what they are clicking on… one wonders if Google would be motivated to change it though?

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