Search giant Google has announced that it will be introducing new types of ads that will start to appear in the mobile version of its iconic search engine, with some of these ads set to interrupt Google’s core search and discovery experiences.
According to the company, searches conducted on mobile devices will soon be including ‘gallery’ adverts. These allow advertisers to display several different images for the user to scroll through. Furthermore, users will also be able to see ads through the company’s Discover feed, which is the feed containing news stories that is built into the majority of Android homepages. Ads will also be visible inside the Google app within its mobile homepage. However, they will only appear in a few selected locations for the time being.
This will be the first time that the Discover feed has contained ads. They will appear like other stories that appear in this feed, with an image, headline and subject field. However, they will have a badge on them indicating that they are an ad.
This new format means that ads will come much more noticeable to users. In a blog post, Prabhakar Raghavan, Google’s Ad Chief, explained that within tests, these gallery ads resulted in as many as 25% more interactions in comparison to the traditional search ads currently displayed.
Google’s gallery ads will only be launched to show on mobile platforms and not desktop. The discovery ads will appear in both versions of the mobile app and within the discover feed for Android devices. Google has also clarified that the Discover ads will not appear in the discover feed built into the mobile homepage of Google.com.
The company has been testing these gallery ads since the beginning of this year and has experimented with other image-led ad formats in the past. Google has confirmed that gallery ads will become widely available to users later on this year, and will be a lot more prominent.
Over the past few years, more visual ads have been added to Google mobile search pages. For example, if a user was to search for a film, Google would pull through images of the movie’s poster, as well as pictures of the leading actors. It would also use photos from top articles about that film. Furthermore, there are other visual elements included such as snippets about reviews, trailers and other video clips.
For Google, adding more visual ads makes sense as they are likely to draw more attention to the content of advertisers. As Google earns money from each click, they could end up generating more revenue for both Google and the advertiser.
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