With the end of American shopping extravaganza Black Friday and the start of Cyber Monday, Google has put a name to the experimental AdWords formats it has released over the past month.
A post on the Inside Adwords blog has announced that these new formats are part of the “Adwords New Formats Initiative”.
The post describes the two major themes of the initiative as “ad extensions” and “new ad models”, and says that the initiative is “Google’s next chapter” in PPC search advertising.
Ad Extensions is aimed at enhancing the existing advertisements of a user’s search engine marketing campaign. Over the past month or so, Google has introduced features such as Ad Sitelinks and Product extensions. The former allows users to provide additional links in their PPC text advertisements to specific landing pages, whilst the latter allows users to link their AdWords account to Google Merchant Centre. Once linked, users can show images and prices of products relevant to the initial search query from their Merchant Centre account. Dan Friedman of the Inside Adwords crew says that these extensions are “designed to help users more quickly and easily find the products and services they seek on Google”.
Google is also introducing new advertising formats with its ‘new ad models’. One of the first of these was the ‘Comparison Ads’ format, launched across the US this month. So far the new format is limited to advertisers for the mortgage and property market. It allows users to “specify the exact product or service they’re looking for and compare multiple offers in a single location”.
Another aspect of the ‘New Ad Models’ theme is a new approach to pricing models for search engine marketing with Google. For example, the ‘product listing ads’ feature, which adds a plusbox to text searches linked to a merchant centre account, is charged on a cost-per-action basis rather than the standard PPC arrangement.
“As more and more users come online searching for products and services, we’ll continue to test new ad extensions and new ad models that make it easier for them to find the information they’re searching for” said Friedman.
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