May 17, 2016: Google has seven standard tabs on its home page (“All,” “Shopping,” “Images,” “Videos,” “Maps,” “More,” and “Search Tools”) that let searchers specify the kind of results they want to see.
Paid placements have run in four of them (“All,” “Shopping,” “Videos,” and “Maps”) for some time; recently, Google announced that it will begin running paid ads in the “Images” Search tab as well.
What do the new ads look like?
Currently ads within the Images tab only appear to be running on mobile devices, not the desktop. These ads are “stripped down” compared to ads in the “Shopping Tab.” They include only the image, a price, and a link to the vendor of the item. A small “sponsored” icon appears above the side-scrolling carousel holding the paid units. Clicking anywhere on the image takes the user to the landing page associated with the paid ad unit. If a user scrolls right within the image ad carousel and clicks “see all,” the user will be taken to the “Shopping Tab.”
What effect on organic?
Given the limited screen real estate available for Google SERPs on mobile devices, the new ads push down organic images significantly, moving all images below the first row “below the fold,” which means they are invisible unless the user scrolls down. It remains to be seen what impact the ads will have on desktop (if Google decides to introduce this feature for desktop users).
How marketers should prepare
Given that Google’s new ad format is so stripped down, marketers using Adwords will not need to tweak any creative, and can likely re-use images already in use in PLA campaigns. Provided the marketer has specified ads to fire over Google’s Search Network (Google’s main properties, including Google.com, plus partner sites running Google search), ads should be eligible to run in the Images tab.
This feature is brand new, and many questions remain, including:
1. The effect it will have on prices for PLA ads – Google’s popular image-centric placement types.
2. Whether conversion rates will be better or worse for ads clicked within the Images tabs than those from other areas.
3. Whether some publishers getting significant organic traffic from organic images in the images will see a significant traffic falloff as a result of the change.
4. Will the “News” tab – a popular high-traffic area that’s never run ads, be next?
For the moment, if you have the budget, your demographic is on mobile, and is – as Google puts it, asking the question “where can I buy what’s in this picture and how much is it?”– Images tab-based ads might just be the right channel for your product marketing.
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