American users of Google’s AdWords service can make use of a new feature aimed at online retailers this week.
The new Product Extensions feature allows Adwords users to incorporate products from their Google Merchant Centre into their text ads. Whenever the text ad appears and a relevant product can be located in Google Merchant Centre, a plusbox is added beneath the text.
Product Extensions then adds relevant images, titles and prices into the plusbox. According to the official Inside Adwords blog, advertisers who used the extension during its beta testing have already seen improved online retail performance.
The blog post cites Zeta Interactive, advertising managers for SonyStyle.com, as one of the beta testers whose search engine marketing benefited from the next feature. They reportedly saw a 10% increase in clickthrough rate for their product extension enabled ad campaigns.
The new feature operates on the same PPC basis as the rest of the AdWords text ads. Whenever a user clicks on either the main text or the products within the Extensions plusbox, the advertiser is charged. However the ‘click’ will only cost if a user simply expands the plusbox without clicking through to the landing page.
Product Extensions must be enabled on an Adwords campaign and will only display when a relevant keyword is entered into a search query. Users can set preferences for which products are displayed out of their Merchant Centre account, allowing advertisers to prioritise inventory in their advertising.
Although the new feature is available to all US advertisers, it is only available in a limited beta outside of America. Dan Friedman of the Inside Adwords crew said that “Over time, we hope to offer product extensions to all advertisers globally”
