14 DAY TRIAL // Google has started rolling out a new look for search ads with a purple background. Google paid search ads have a pale yellow background to differentiate them from the regular, organic search results. While the yellow background has become somewhat of an industry standard, Google has actually introduced it just about three years ago, switching from light blue.
Google has been testing the purple background for ads for at least a couple of months with a few users, as it does with all changes and new features for its web properties. The company has now started rolling out the purple ads to everyone and should finish by the end of the week.
“Starting today and ramping up to 100% globally by the end of this week, we’ll be changing the background color for ads that appear above the search results on Google.com as well as our local domains. The ads, which currently have a pale yellow background, will change to have a pale purple background,” Google said in a statement.
“This change is part of the ‘look and feel’ update to our color palette and logo that we made back in May of this year to keep the Google results page looking fresh and modern. This is purely an aesthetic change to our ads and won’t have any impact on the way we target or serve advertisements on Google.com,” it continued.
As Google makes clear, the changes are only to the background color of the ads, nothing else is changing. The reason for the change, Google says, is to make the ads integrate better with the new colors introduced when the revamped Google Search was launched a few months ago. The redesigned Google Search features brighter colors and a somewhat livelier look.
Apparently, the change is purely aesthetic, the purple ads are not easier to spot than the yellow ones, or even if they are, that’s not the main reason for the change. Interestingly, both Bing and Yahoo have yellow backgrounds for their search ad.