Yesterday, Google announced that all advertisers now have access to product ads. This presents a great opportunity for advertisers. The user tests I have been involved in recently show that searchers eyes are certainly drawn to those ads before they are drawn to the standard blue links. This is just one more recent change Google has made to their search results page (SERPS) and understanding these changes have a true impact on how you market on the search engines.

When was the last time , if ever, that you played voyeur and watched someone perform  a search for one of your key phrases? Here is a snippet from a user test video of someone searching for “black diamond earrings.”

What did  you take away from this 1 minute clip?

Did the advertisers have the best possible images in place?

My client and I learned many things from watching the rest of the test (that footage not provided) and others was that many searchers don’t click through to see if you have any other products that might meet their need if they don’t think the product ad meets their expectations.

If you haven’t been watching how visitors search for your products using some kind of user testing and have been only relying on your standard click-through rate/conversion metrics you are probably missing out on a large opportunity and you may be effectively blind to the entire search process.

What it takes to be enlightened:

How about 10 minutes and $75?

You can get  up to get 3 independent people (the testers) to search for your main key phrase (with product ads or not) for just $75.

  • Each tester will do a search for your phrase and;
  • evaluate which 4 ads they would be most likely to click on and;
  • evaluate each landing page for 5 seconds to see if the ad met their expectations and;
  • also provide their first impressions of the page.
  • After all that, each tester will dig deeper into each of those sites to see if they would be comfortable buying from you or one of your competitors.

The insight you get is invaluable. It would be worthwhile if only to find out what you competitors are doing right in searchers eyes. This process used to prohibitively expensive but at these prices there is no reason that you can’t work on at least one  different important ad group every month.

If you’d care  to see more of the insights I’ve gleaned from watching many of these user tests then please et me know and I’ll post more.

Please share if you think others would benefit.