I’ve never seen or heard of this before – it may be new, or just new to me… I did a search on a phrase for which I happen to have one of my client sites bidding on in AdWords PPC. Its not a terribly competitive keyword, and there were no ads shown at the very top (where you often see the top two PPC ads), but there were four ads over on the right. My client’s site was the second one of the four total.
I then scrolled down to the bottom of the page and saw the ads on the bottom – which is at least a relatively new and not quite as common position – same blue background style as the typical first 2 PPC ads, just after the ten organic listings. Anyhow, my site was there again, along with one of the other 4 ads that were on the right (the one that was listed first).
Thus, Google is showing my ad twice for one search. Won’t this hurt me? Doesn’t it decrease my ads’ CTR (clickthrough rate) b/c now best case one user in one attempt can only click one ad on the screen, whereas I presume I’m registering two ad impressions. Sure there is the argument that they could click the back button and then I’d have another shot, but I’m going to go out on a limb and say that not all users click on more than one ad, as they may have found what they wanted with the first click – again, thus potentially lowering one’s CTR (per impression), although potentially generating more clicks in total due to the additional listing.