On 06 July, the week following Google's slight change in layout, we found a test advert which looked like it was being run by the company, and which included the location 'England' beneath it.

Today many searches are returning results like this:



So we thought, 'maybe the geotargeted location of the campaign is getting rendered in the ad text', which would kind of make sense. Then, ads like this started to appear: 



Which obviously isn't a field in the campaign settings.

So, has adwords just got more local? It would certainly secure the the platform's market share against traditional newspaper classifieds, a market which looks unlikely to recover post-recession.

As noted by the Mashable crew last Thursday, Google's results page changed last week, with the team deciding to scale down the company's logo, remove the page load times which followed the URL and indent the results somewhat.

Hardly game-changing stuff, but it does show that the guys over at Google are continuing to refine their product to be as speedy as possible, which I guess is a good thing.

But is this new layout making way for a change in how search ads are displayed?

Whilst admiring the new layout on Saturday morning we found this test ppc ad:



We've cut the image to fit the screen, but you can see that the structure of the advert is longer than usual, with the country location posted beneath the URL:



The ability to serve up ads to users in very geo-specific areas has had a serious impact on people's account structures, and I think it's fair to say that most people running adwords are fans, with cheap clicks and higher CTRs coming off localised campaigns.

Does this test ad show that we are about to be able to add a location beneath the display URL in adwords? I can imagine it would help advertisers write relevant ads for these geo-targeted campaigns, increase CTRs, and therefore increase Google's profits - which, aesthetic wonderment over the size of the indented columns aside, is the rhythm to which the Google engineers play.

Or was it just a blip?