AdWords Product Listing Ads Now Available For All U.S. Advertisers

Within the week, all U.S. advertisers will be able to use Google Product Listing Ads, Google announcedyesterday. Product Ads feature product images, price, and merchant names in shopping related searches.

Product Listing Ads are usually charged on a cost-per-action (CPA) basis (although cost-per-click bidding is also available), meaning advertisers only pay when a user clicks on an ad and completes a purchase on their site.
Advertisers will share a percentage of revenue with Google. The ads work through Google Merchant Center accounts and don't require keywords or additional ad text, just a product feed.

Google has tested the ads with roughly 800 advertisers since the adslaunched last year.
Alex Cohen wrote about how Paid Listing Ads, which replaced some text ads in Google's paid search results, dramatically changed the nature of paid search advertising in "Why Google Wants to Eliminate Bidding In Exchange for Your Profits." He called the ads revolutionary for three reasons:

1. You don't have power over when your ads appear. 

2. You can't set your bid. Your ads can only show up if you agree to participate on a CPA basis. 

3. The system is entirely controlled by Google. It's ... connected to your Google Merchant Center account. You define the parameters and then hand the keys over to their system. Regular AdWords advertisers don't have the option to display these types of ads.

It's opt-in like agreeing to the iTunes terms of service is opt-in: it's something we want and the price of entry is going along with whatever Google asks. It's all or nothing.

According to Advertising Age, "In the near-term, product ads will only be available to marketers with managed accounts on a cost-per-acquisition basis; ultimately, though, self-serve advertisers will have access. Right now, the format won't appear on mobile phones."
Google said that, during testing, searchers were twice as likely to click on a Product Listing Ad versus a standard text ad in the same location
Here's Google's video about the service:

Google Expands Product Ads in Search With New Unit, Google Receives a Cut of the Sale

Google search results are going to start looking more like a catalog, with images of products along with prices and other information on the search page.

An example of a Google Product Ad.

Google had been testing the new ads with 800 advertisers over the past year, but today released its Product Ads feature out of beta. For the first time, major advertisers will be able to automatically have images of their products pulled into search results. Unlike auction-based search keywords, where marketers pay by the click, with Product Ads, they'll only pay if there's a purchase and share revenue with Google.

"This is a new kind of advertising system with Google," Susan Wojcicki, senior VP of Google advertising products, said today at a roundtable event at Google headquarters in Mountain View. With Product Ads -- which show up as photos and several lines of text, including price, alongside search results like traditional AdWords ads -- advertisers only need to provide Google with the product feed and decide on the percentage of revenue share.

Advertisers already provide the feed to Google in order to be featured in product search. Retailers do not need to buy keywords, prepare the text for the ad or decide which items from their inventory to include in their AdWords campaign. "This takes a lot of the labor out of managing a campaign," Ms. Wojcicki said. "We are changing the way the back-end works."

Retailers who have hundreds of thousands -- or millions -- of items in their catalogs may not have time to manage that many keywords or the constant switch of seasonal items.

"A company may only concentrate on 20 percent of their products that drive sales," said Dennis Woodside, VP-Americas operations. "Now, because they provide us their entire product feed, all of their inventory is in circulation."

While retailers are giving up some of control for this particular product, Ms. Wojcicki said that Product Ads are an additional channel for advertising since companies are already using the AdWords keyword model for their search advertising.

As to be expected, Google had some marketers on-hand that had experienced success during the beta test.

Camping equipment retailer Campmor's marketing manager, Nick Scilingo, said the company's click-through rate increased by 260% during the Product Ads beta and increased total clicks to their site by 40%. Campmor has 25,000 items for sale and buys about 3,000 keywords from Google's AdWords program. Mr. Scilingo said that because he only has two people on his marketing team, he likes that he doesn't have to spend time writing text ads and choosing keywords but can rely on Google to automatically choose relevant products from Campmor's merchant center account when someone enters a search related to one of their products.

The CPA format has a few pricing options. Michael Manta, Diapers.com marketing manager, said that he chooses the percentage based on the category of product.

In the near-term, product ads will only be available to marketers with managed accounts on a cost-per-acquisition basis; ultimately, though, self-serve advertisers will have access. Right now, the format won't appear on mobile phones.

Facebook Avoids Google’s Data Stick — For Now

Updated: Facebook has responded to Google’s recent data blockade by effectively going around the barrier, according to a report today. Last week, Google changed the terms of use for its contacts API, which allows third-party services to pull the info from your Gmail address book automatically, and said that this would only be allowed if other services did the same — and the company has made it crystal clear that this was aimed directly at Facebook, which doesn’t provide that ability. Now Facebook is apparently using Google’s own contact-download feature to get around this blockage.

A source familiar with Google’s thinking said the company made a deliberate choice to go after Facebook on the issue of data portability. Although some observers were concerned about the impact that Google’s reciprocity statement might have on smaller players, the source said “this is not a blanket policy. [Google] is effectively enforcing it on a case-by-case basis — and Facebook is clearly the biggest, and the most closed” in terms of its data-portability policies. Google only went the API route, this source says, because attempts to convince the giant social network to open up went nowhere. “They tried the carrot approach and it didn’t work, so now they are bringing out the stick.”

Now, instead of automatically pulling in your Gmail contact list to find those users on Facebook, the giant social network has a button that lets you download your contacts from Google, then upload the file to Facebook, thereby accomplishing pretty much the same thing without Google’s approval. As The Guardian notes, this effectively takes advantage ofthe web giant’s own data-liberation policies, which make it easy for users to get their information out of Google’s databases. While Facebook recently added a feature that allows users to download their photos, wall posts and other content, it does not make it easy to pull your contacts’ email addresses (according to one of our commenters, however, this is possible if you use a Yahoo Mail import tool).

Now Facebook has used the search company’s own data-liberation policies to avoid the stick that the web giant is waving. Google could change the terms under which users can download their own data, or alter the process in order to make it harder for Facebook to get it, but that would look bad — and risks irritating users. In effect, Google is trapped by its own commitment to openness, and has to allow Facebook to import contacts without providing the same download feature. For now, at least, it seems that the social network’s “roach motel” approach to data will continue.

Update: A Google spokesman provided this statement on Facebook’s latest move:

We’re disappointed that Facebook didn’t invest their time in making it possible for their users to get their contacts out of Facebook. As passionate believers that people should be able to control the data they create, we will continue to allow our users to export their Google contacts.”

Google Unveils New Tool For Faster Web

Somewhere within Google, there's an organization known as the "Make the Web Faster" initiative, and today, a representative presented the world with a gift.  Something new named mod_pagespeed is supposed to make streamlining a site a quick, easy process.

A Google representative explained in an email to WebProNews, "We just launched a new open-source Apache module called mod_pagespeed that any webmasters can use to quickly and automatically optimize their sites.  (It's like Page Speed, but makes the changes automatically.)"

Then, in case anyone was wondering whether mod_pagespeed is worth looking into, the representative continued, "It can reduce page load times by up to 50% - in other words, essentially speeding up websites by roughly 2x."

So mod_pagespeed should be of definite use to webmasters, considering it's common knowledge that would-be visitors bail when things take too long to load.

Plus, as Google factors site speed into Web search rankings, having a fast site will help ensure that would-be visitors are directed to it in the first place.

In any event, it's a good bet that more site speed tools and suggestions are on the way.  Google's representative wrote, "At Google, we're obsessed with speed - we measure it, pick it apart, think about it constantly.  It's even baked into our quarterly goals."