Google have made two major announcements this week; confirmation that a ‘Buy’ button will be added to purchase products featured in Shopping ads (A.K.A. Product Listing Ads or PLAs), and a new integration with YouTube TrueView ads. Both of these new features are set to be fully unveiled at the Google I/O event in San Francisco later today.
The ‘Buy’ Button
The roll-out of the ‘Buy’ button on Google Shopping Ads is “imminent”, according to Google’s Chief Business Officer Omid Kordestani, who confirmed the new feature at the Code conference in California last week.
The ‘Buy’ button is the latest sign of Google’s ambitions to attempt to capture more revenue from online retailers such as Amazon by making it as easy as possible for consumers to make a purchase in very few clicks.
For the time being, this feature will appear on Google’s paid product listing ads on mobile devices only – much the same as a click to call button does already. It’s rumoured that shoppers who click on the ads on their phones will then be directed to a Google webpage to make a purchase of the item – though this is all speculation and no official announcement about how it will work has been made as yet.
What impact this will have on CTR for organic results is yet to be seen, but a big ‘BUY’ button across an already eye-catching product image is sure to appeal to a lot of consumers, and steal away some traffic.
Product Listing Ad Integration with YouTube TrueView Ads
The second announcement from Google is set to further monetise YouTube through the integration of PLAs in TrueView ads. TrueView ads are the skippable ad clips that appear before a video. Advertisers do not pay for ads that a user skips.
Google states:
“Thanks to the first-ever integration of the Google Merchant Center into video ads, advertisers need only connect their campaign with a Merchant Center feed to dynamically add products to their in-stream videos, customized for each user through contextual and audience signals like geography and demographic info.”
Here is the way in which these ads are going to work:
You are doing some home improvements – let’s say you want to tile a bathroom. If you search for a video like ‘how to tile a bathroom’ there’s a chance that you’ll be presented with a TrueView ad from a DIY retailer – and overlaid on the video are links directly to products from their tiling department.
Pretty creepy, right?
I personally already find YouTube ads to be quite intrusive and annoying, and I’m wondering if users looking for information will appreciate being bombarded with advertising. In saying that, both Wayfair and Sephora have reported impressive results using this new ad format.
What do you make of the new Google Shopping features? Will you be trying them? Let us know!
