Wouldn’t it be great if you could replace your Adwords text ad by some catalog preview with photos of your products? It is now possible with the product extensions feature.

What are Product Extensions?

Like ad sitelinks and location extensions, product extensions are another way to enrich your existing Adwords ad with additional and relevant information. Before clicking on the ad, the user can now see the picture, the description and the price of the product matching the search query.

How do you set up Product Extensions?

To activate Product extensions, you need first to upload your product listings into an interface called Google Merchant Center (ex. Google Base).

Let’s be honest, uploading your products is definitely the tricky part. As the volume of products can be pretty significant, recommendation is to use a data feed to create and manage your product listings.

Uploading your products on Google Merchant Center will give you much more than just accessing the product extensions feature on Adwords. Indeed Google Merchant Center is primarily used for displaying products on Google Product Search, also known as Google Shopping (launched in Australia yesterday). This product has already been live in the US for many years, it’s now a given for Retail advertisers to use this with their Paid Search campaigns. For Oz Retailers it’s definitely worth adding your catalogue into your Merchant Center account.

Once it’s done, activating the product extensions is pretty simple. Just add your Adwords ID to your Google Merchant Center account. Then visit the campaign settings tab in your Adwords account, find the ‘Ad extensions’ headings and select the option “use product images and information from my Google Merchant Center account”.

You then have the option to allow Adwords to automatically target which product displays for queries or to manual targeting which product you would like to display for a specific query or queries (more on that later!). No need to create a new campaign and no extra CPC will be charged to use the feature.

Are Product Extensions a must have for eCommerce Retailers?

In the United States where this feature has been available since the end of 2009, this additional information seemed to have improved the performance of the search campaigns. Indeed some advertisers reported seeing a 1257% increase in CTR when the product plusbox was expanded! Sonystyle.com also reported a 9% increase in conversion rate.

However, some analysis also shows that the plus box expansion rate remains low on the ads. This supports the point of a strong headline either making or breaking the performance of an ad. Without a good headline, it doesn’t matter how many features within a paid search ad.

A previously highlighted problem with the product extensions is that you lose the control of your ad as Google decides which product appears under which ad. This is perfectly ok for very niche products but is it for retailers that sell a wide range of similar but different products? You might sell cheap and premium plasma tvs. If the user types plasma tvs on Google, is Google going to display your cheap plasma tv that performs well or display the premium tv with a low conversion rate?

One refinement that has been made to Product Extensions has been the targeting options – these are now flexible. Previously there was only automatic targeting i.e. Google displayed the product they felt was most relevant to a specific query. However, now Product Extensions gives you the option to manually target as well. You can decide which products are displayed when certain queries triggers your ads.

Overall,  in a context where the product is still new in Australia and very few advertisers use it, I think the extensions are definitely a good way to make your ad stand out more than your competitors’ ads and to potentially boost your CTR and your conversion rate with no extra cost. The next couple of weeks should be interesting as the Product Search results will start being incorporated into the Search results (not just being restricted to the Product Search view).

In addition to this, the recent release of Google Shopping in Australia is definitely a good reason to start using Google Merchant Center.

Do you believe in the Product Extensions potential?  Do you think data feed can discourage ecommerce site to use the Google Merchant Center? Are you going to use Google Shopping?

Yesterday, after a long wait for many retailers (see my Product Search for Mobile post from ‘09 ), Google Shopping was officially launched in Australia. Interchangeably known as Google Product Search, it allows searchers to easily discover product information online, compare prices across retailers, read reviews and ultimately find the best place to make a purchase. In essence, it helps inform the research phase of the buying cycle.

Google Shopping is styled as an extension to Google’s usual search offering rather than a competitor and offers a service similar to those offered by the likes of GetPrice and Shopping.com. A key point for retailers to note is that when a product listing is clicked on within Google Shopping, it takes the user to the specific product page on that retailer’s site, by which time they should be well informed and ready to purchase.

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E-commerce retailers can submit their product catalogues for free via Google Merchant Center which then makes them eligible to appear in Shopping results (submission is via a data feed or an API for advanced users). As with regular Google search, an algorithm determines what product listings hold most relevance to search queries users make, and other factors such as frequency of inventory(catalogue) updates, photo clarity, title used etc will affect your chances of ranking strongly. Shopping results can appear directly within the regular Google search results where relevant, as part of Universal Search. For this reason, SEO results could be be impacted as top 10 rankings may be pushed further down the page to allow for integration of blended Shopping results.

Google has specified that products must have a set price to appear in Shopping results, hence auction listings are not eligible to appear. Filters can be set on the left hand side to narrow results to a specific price range. In the above example, eBay listings appear since they offer a ‘Buy Now’ price.

For more information on the opportunity this presents to paid search advertisers, please take a minute to read my colleague Marion’s post on Google Product Extensions.

Google officially announced on their blog on Thursday that they’ve released Google Product Search for mobile. I know personally I would find this very useful, as there have been many times I’ve been in a store pondering a purchase yet hold back until I can get online and read a couple of reviews. Mobile product search capabilities would allow me whip out my iPhone (if I had one!) and read a couple of reviews on the spot, and save me a return visit to the store. The product information comes neatly formatted for phone browsers (as pictured), with easy access to ratings, reviews, price comparisons and more.

Google has stated that those who have already submitted their product listings do not need to do anything to be eligible for displaying on mobile, but it represents a good opportunity to create and optimise your product landing pages for mobile users.

Now this is all well and good for those eCommerce stores in the US that utilise Product Search, but Australian sellers are missing out and have been for too long in my opinion. Google Australia still isn’t showing those shopping results seen in Google.com when a search is made.

On a related note, SEORoundtable have reported a new option within Google Base admin where you can now choose to ‘Share with Adwords’ your product listings. This new feature offers a searcher the option of displaying products from a particular seller showing an ad in the sponsored listings. This represents another engagement opportunity that Australian sellers will be missing out on until such time as a full rollout of Product Search happens here.