Bassem Ghali

While attending the SMX advanced conference in California, Google Senior Product Manager for Ads Quality – Nick Fox, presented several new PPC products from Google AdWords.

Over the years Google organic search results have presented huge amounts of new add-ons. Google universal search is being responded to well because they serve the right content (videos, images, news, blogs, ..) at the right time.

Google AdWords teams are taking the same approach and extending it to AdWords ads. The new ad models / formats are considered a fundamental change to ad format, pricing and targeting.

Google AdWords new ad formats:

• Ad Sitelinks
• Product ads
• Local ads
• Comparison ads

AdWords Sitelinks ads

This allows Google AdWords advertisers to display up to four text links underneath an AdWords ad, with the Sitelinks ad format brining users to a specific page on your website. The Google AdWords team says typically they are seeing 30%-40% increase in click-through rates with solid conversion rates as well when advertisers adopt Sitelinks.

AdWords Product ads

This allows Google AdWords advertisers to display specific products and product photos under the AdWords ad. Product extensions are tied to advertiser Google Merchant Center accounts; you can simply setup your Google merchant center account by filling out an Excel spreadsheet with parameters like price, description, etc.

AdWords Local ads

This allows Google AdWords advertisers to display addresses, links to get directions and Google map thumbnails. You might already have seen this ad format, but the new AdWords Local ad format is for chains. When an ad is displayed, it will include a map with all the business locations around the area. By dragging around the Google map, the map will update with different business locations. This feature is tied with the advertiser Google Local Business Center account.

AdWords Comparison ads

This allows consumers to compare multiple relevant lending offers such as home mortgage rates from different banks or mortgage lenders. If a Google searcher is considering a relevant offer, they can either call the lender or request a quote.  For more protection of the searcher information, Google  sends the advertising company a unique code to contact the searcher.

Mortgage comparison ads are currently available for companies in the US and credit card comparison ads are currently available for companies in the UK.

Mortgage comparison ads

Credit card comparison

Why use the new AdWords ad formats?:

1. They push your competitors ads down and you take up more screen space.
2. The new AdWords ad formats have additional tracking features, so you can further optimize your PPC campaign. Google AdWords has presented new tracking metrics like PlusBox impressions, PlusBox expansion rate, PlusBox expansions, and CTR when PlusBox was expanded, etc.

One has to wonder how long will it take for the Bing and Yahoo!  Search engines to introduce something similar.

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