Google has always had a love-hate relationship with
advertising. Its power and wealth come from the over $16 billion a year
of
advertising that it sells. Yet on its most
important pages, the results from its Web search engine, it has limited ads to
nothing more garish than a dozen words of text. That is about to change and Google started testing video ads on some pages of search results. And it is developing ad formats with images, interactive maps and other more elaborate features. Last year Google introduced what it calls universal search, which mixes images, videos, news stories and other types of information with the standard text
links to Web pages.
Text ads are not as effective on pages with search results that include images and video. The eyes of users automatically gravitate to the images more than the text. Now that Google’s main search results pages include more images, video links and other elements, it is more appropriate, to have corresponding advertising formats. Ads with accompanying videos will have a small button with a plus sign. Google has increasingly used the plus icon to indicate that certain information — like a map — can pop up on a search results page. Users that click the plus button on an ad will see a small video player that shows a commercial, movie trailer or other clip.
Google would explore adding small thumbnail photos to the video ads as well. People who advertise a movie want to show a trailer. For now, advertisers will not pay extra to put video in the ads. They enter a price they will pay for a click in Google’s
regular text-ad auction. But in the video ads, the advertiser pays when users
click to see the video, even if they never click through to the advertiser’s
site. This allows Google to expand what it can offer advertisers that are
focused on
promoting their brands, rather than driving traffic to a Web site. “If you search for golf clubs, you get ads for golf clubs, not a banner ad about
Pepsi that you may drink on the golf course”. As always on Google, ads are
shown based on a combination of factors, including the amount bid and how often they are clicked on. Google, which owns YouTube, the largest user-contributed video site on the Web, has been exploring a wide range of ways to put video ads online. It started selling video ads that could appear on other Web sites two years ago. The test is scheduled to begin in a small fraction of Google
searches.