Google announced yesterday that they’re going to change how URLs appear in ads on search results pages.

The search engine constantly tweaks and refines it’s offerings and way of going about things, and the latest announcement is that all URLs displayed in ads will be shown with the domain in lower case, and then anything after that however you stipulate.

Eg. www.18aProductions.co.uk will become www.18aproductions.co.uk

Whilst www.18aProductions.co.uk/Services would become www.18aproductions.co.uk/Services

Also Accounts.18aproductions.co.uk/Services would become accounts.18aproductions.co.uk/Services

From looking at a typical search results page, this is how Google displays organic search results, and they say their decisions are made by evaluating user metrics such as clickthrough rates. So either, they think lower case top level domains are easier on the eye and so more clickable, or they’re trying to subtly make ads look more like organic results.

I’ve been planning some research for a while into user’s click habits with regards to Adwords and as soon as I have anything to report, I’ll be sure to write it up here! Do people try to avoid clicking on ads? Do they feel they’re less likely to be useful, or more likely to be “salesy”? And so is making them look more like organic listings a way of overcoming this? Or to people generally respond better to URLs written in lower case, no matter where they are? I’ll investigate!