There have been many revolutions throughout the Internet industry over the last few months. One of these innovations has been the announcement by Google that they are beta testing a new enhancement on their pay per click sponsored links section, which allows members of the public to view images of the products listed simply by clicking on the tab located at the base of the sponsored link. Click Through Rate Google are hopeful that by adding these visual aids to links it will help to improve the click through rate CTR that customers receive from the paid service and the internet giant will surely be anticipating that the improved conversion rate will help to attract new customers on to its paid service.The new system will work with up to four products per ad, which basically means that you will be able to put up to four images on any one sponsored ad. This will help give companies the opportunity to promote their products and related items to their target audience, which may increase sales and also hopefully the conversion rate of the companies transactions. The four images in the dropdown will each have a different landing page meaning that you can advertise completely separate but related items using just one ad. It has the advantage of showing similar products or peripherals that a potential customer may need or be interested in. CTR and time on site as well as conversions could all see positive results from the new approach.Experts have suggested that this new technology may well appeal higher with males, who are predominantly dominated by the left hemisphere of their brain and therefore base a large proportion of their judgements on visual suggestion, although it stands to reason that having the maximum amount of data available when making a decision about a purchase will aid everyone.BetaThe new technology is under Beta test at present and is only available to customers with a ‘high quality threshold’ which is probably Google’s way of explaining that you will need to spend above a certain amount of money to benefit from the service. Google will have the right to be selective with what customers they decide to invite onto the test as they aim to receive as much positive feedback as possible.It also means that Google will probably not look to aim this at the ever expanding pornography industry which obviously is a significant earner for internet companies. Whether Google will eventually add technology to enable these images to count towards the relevancy score is uncertain but any enhancements that the company can make helps to improve the service provided and therefore makes using the internet easier and more pleasurable.Google’s image Adwords may only be in beta testing at present but it certainly gets the thumbs up from me.
-Ryan Walker
CEO – Gazelle Interactive
