Google Begins “Next Chapter” in Search Advertising

Update: Google says its new ad formats are "the next chapter in search advertising", and its "AdWords New Ad Formats Initiative" will focus on two themes:

• Ad extensions offer you the ability to enhance your existing text ads with additional relevant information. Some examples of ad extensions include Ad Sitelinks which allow you to provide additional links pointing to specific information on your site and Product Extensions which allow you to show images and prices of relevant products from your Google Merchant Center account. By putting the most salient information directly wiithin the ad, ad extensions are designed to help users more quickly and easily find the products and services they seek on Google.
  
  
• New ad models are formats that offer better solutions to more complicated queries. For example, Comparison Ads enable users to specify the exact product or service they're looking for and compare multiple offers in a single location. New ad models also offer advertisers new pricing models, like cost per action for Product Listing Ads. Our new ad models are designed to make it easier for users to find exactly what they want and for you to reach more users with better information.

Original Article: Google is now offering some new formats for search ads. They have already been testing them in the U.S., so there is a chance you have already seen some of them if you live here.

Some of them include videos. Some include maps. Some include multiple links for different landing pages. Some of the new ads include product images with corresponding links and prices. Some actually offer comparison shopping functionality.

Take a look at some examples:

"At Google, we're committed to giving you the information you want — regardless of the form in which it might appear," says Google VP, Product Management Susan Wojcicki. "Text is often useful, but sometimes videos and pictures are a more effective way to receive information. For example, if you want to learn a magic trick, a video showing you how to perform the trick is likely the best result. So over the past few years, we've blended videos, images, maps and more into the search results on Google.com."

Using that logic, Google figured its search ads should fit a similar mold. The company says that while it is experimenting with new formats, they will "remain loyal" to their core principal, which is, "getting the right ad to the right person at the right time."

Google says you will probably see even more formats appear with search results in the future. This will occur until they figure out which ones are most useful, relevant, and engaging. Expect a lot of new things.

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Bing Shopping Shows Impressive Growth Since Launch

Hitwise is sharing some information about how well Bing Shopping is doing. They have compared its performance from the week ending June 6th, just after its launch to its performance for the week ending August 8.

In that time, Bing Shopping has increased by 169%, according to the information supplied by Heather Dougherty of Hitwise. Bing Shopping entered the firm's category of Comparison Shopping Tools at number 8, with 4% of visits within the category. Last week, it reached 4th place with 11%. 

"Nearly 30% of the traffic to Bing Shopping was referred from Bing (18.32%) and MSN (11.34%) last week," explains Dougherty. "Of the visitors to Bing Shopping referred from Bing, 66.81% were new visitors to the website (have not visited in the past 30 days) and 49.88% from MSN were new. Additionally, 5.86% of visitors were from Google (75.01% new) and another 3.54% were from Yahoo! Search (68.41% new)."

Amazon, eBay, and Buy.com were the most visited retailers following Bing Shopping. Here's Hitwise's look at the upstream and downstream clicks:

This week, Bing began its "double saving" days, which allow Bing users to get twice the amount of money back as they usually do in the cashback program, until the end of the month (unless Microsoft decides to cut it off early).