Remember when Google search ads used to be three lines of text? Nowadays, says Google in a new blog post, roughly one-third of searches with ads show an enhanced ad format (featuring video preview windows, prices, images, specific links on a given Web page, recommendations from your friends and whatnot).
Or as Google puts it in the blog post:
What started as three lines of simple text has evolved into ads that are multimedia-rich, location-aware and socially-amplified.
The company will talk more about what’s new with search ads tomorrow at Advertising Week in New York City, and according to Bloomberg will launch “Web-based circulars” that are similar to the ad inserts included in newspapers, thus making Google look more and more “like the Sunday paper.”
If it were up to Google, advertisers would no longer opt for ads that only show three lines of text.
Google has already gone live with a dedicated promotion website to tout enhanced search ads, and published a series of videos that should help advertisers understand what they’re all about.
They also talk numbers, such as:
– Every day there are more than a billion searches on Google. (source: Google)
– Since 2003, Google has answered 450 billion new unique queries. (source: Google)
– The +1 button is being served 5 billion times a day all over the web. (source: Google)
– The average query response time is roughly a quarter of a second. (source: Google)
– More than 20% of searches on Google on a desktop are related to location. On mobile, it‘s about 40%. (source: Google)
– People drive more than 12 billion miles a year with Google Maps Navigation. (source: Google)
And:
– Every query has to travel on average 1,500 miles to get back to the user. (source: Google)
– More than half our searches come from outside the U.S. (source: Google)
– We’ve never seen 16% of the queries we see every day. (source: Google)
– Users exposed to a major tech company’s search ads reported a 27% more favorable opinion after seeing the ad. (source: Nurago & Google)
– Consumers like to get exactly where they want to go. Two-line sitelinks increase click-through rates by more than 30% compared to standard AdWords ads. (source: Google)
– 70% of Americans report that they look for product reviews before making a purchase. (source: Penn, Schoen & Berland Associates)
– 80% of reviews on the site of a given retailer are written by the top 20% of their customers. (source: Google)
– We are seeing mobile search grow at an exponential rate, increasing fivefold worldwide in just the past two years. (source: Yankee Group)
– YouTube now exceeds 200 million views a day on mobile, a 3x increase in 2010. (source: Google)