You may have seen these new ad formats show up in your account recently. They are not in full release yet, but many advertisers are now able to run them after the latest Adwords maintenance last Sunday. These template ads, or rich media ads are for the Google content network only. The are much more content heavy ads than a standard text or image ad that you could previously run on the content network. These type of rich media ads can also be run on third party networks, but now Adwords is fully in the game.
One of the main benefits of these ads is the interaction tracking. This lets you see statistics of things like user mouseovers of images, and clicks on various ad components like next, previous, poll results etc… Which really helps you optimize your ads based on the interaction data. The interactions that you can track vary based on the ad type.
There are 7 different types of template ads that you can build:
- Showcase Template Ad
- Slideshow Template Ad
- Quiz Template Ad
- Business Locator Template Ad
- Photo Gallery Template Ad
- Site Search Template Ad
- Coupon Template Ad
These ads are easy to create, just plug your info and images into the template.
I have testing some of these ads for 3 weeks with mixed results. The formats I have tried are the Showcase, Quiz, and Coupons templates. I am having trouble getting decent volume with the ads, which is not surprising due to the early stage of the rollout. Once the formats become more widely accepted and the publisher base expands a bit more with Adsense publishers, I see this being a very good opportunity for marketers. Conversion rates have been strong with the low volume.
I am curious to hear if other people are testing these with good results. Anyone want to share there experiences?
I have not see these yet. It looks very interesting based on the information you have give.
they haven’t showed up in my account as an option yet. I’ll keep checking your blog for updates. Thanks!
I have not seen them as an option yet either. They look interesting, will probably use them when they get more popular.
Wow that’s pretty cool. I doubt these are available in my account, but I’m happy to see Google keep innovating (or at least, adding new features.)
Hey Chad thanks for keeping us up-to-date. I had no idea about this. Damn full time job keeps me busy.
I’m happy to see Google coming up new idea. Reason why they are #1 and my #1 traffic and income source.
About time google offered this I have been waiting for them to offer us options besides the normal text it will definitely bring mroe quality form content bidding.