Google Announces New Product Listing Ads: The GIANT Awakes!

Written by John View Comments
Last Updated November 13, 2009

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Google announces a new feature for sponsored listing links. This indicates that online retailers can now launch all of their products in the Google Merchant Center account and only pay a fee when someone purchases something from their shopping cart. Consumers will begin to see these product listings ads more frequently they move into the peak of the holiday shopping season.

“Everyday we come across many users come to Google.com to research products and find where to buy them,” says Google’s Dan Friedman. “To better serve these users, we have been testing a new feature of AdWords called Product Listing Ads. Product Listing Ads works with an advertiser’s Google Merchant Center account to serve highly targeted ads that include richer product information directly in the ad itself — including product image, price, and merchant name.”

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Global search leader Google has recently been engaged in experimenting its new “Product Listing Ads” ad format with several online retailers as a new model to get paid search ads featuring product images in Google.com search results, and yesterday, the company announced that they are beginning to expand their product listings ads beta program to more merchants — just in time for the holiday shopping season.

Product Listing Ads is part of Google’s effort to simplify the advertising process for merchants with large product inventories. Some of the key features of Product Listing Ads include:

Pay only for results: Product Listing Ads are charged on a cost-per-action (CPA) basis, which means that you only pay when a user clicks on your ad and completes a purchase on your site. Because Product Listing Ads is charged on a CPA basis, it offers a risk-free way for you to reach a larger audience on Google.com.
List your entire inventory: Product Listing Ads requires no keywords or additional ad text. Whenever a user enters a search query relevant to an item in your Google Merchant Center account, Google will automatically show the most relevant products along with the associated image, price and product name. Product Listing Ads makes it easy for you to promote your entire product inventory on Google.com.

At this time, Product Listing Ads is still a beta feature and is only available to a limited number of retail advertisers. Over time, they will increase the number of users who see Product Listing Ads as well as the number of advertisers able to participate.

A large number of ecommerce sites typically employ some sort of pay per click marketing in their overall advertising plan. With the latest release, online retailers can become more efficient and move beyond the click based pricing model to a cost per action pricing model.