Google have this week expanded their testing of the “” within – a project which entitles users to click a “plus” inside a sponsored listing, displaying products and information from that listing before the user clicks on the ad link itself. Now sending your feed to is ever more vital for ecommerce sites!
Google’s Product Plusbox has moved into a limited beta setting, available only in the US at the moment, but can give you a sneak preview here of what it looks like now. If it’s successful for Google we could well see ecommerce sponsored listings revolutionised for optimisation in the future.
So imagine you want to buy some shoes and, somewhat inevitably, you head to Google to search for a generic term to see what comes up. Being a typical web user and in a hurry, you choose the wildly inventive search keyword of “shoes”. So, here’s the results:
As a typical web user, you’re also highly likely to only glance at these results and choose one of the highest results on the page. The Google Adwords sponsored listings attract your attention:
The ads are all quite similar, but one stands out from the others:
What’s this Plusbox here? “See More Products”? Ideal! Not knowing the ads cost anything I’m not bothered whether I click or not, but the plus button is a potential time saver…
Is this actually going to be the case? Would the Google Adwords Plusbox make that much difference to a user? A visual snapshot of the shop’s offerings would be very useful for a user and could be a driver of relevant traffic to a shop’s site. In some ways impatient web browsers may be impatient and want to leave the search results, or put off by the generic nature of the products on view. Within specific long tail results however, you could see these Adwords campaigns bringing very impressive goal conversions.
In addition Google have also enabled a , so stock results and maps can be displayed for various businesses.
If you want to get involved in the experiment you can have a word with your Adwords representative and hopefully you’ll see a Plusbox on your ads within days!
