If you have searched for something on Google in the past few weeks you might have noticed something different. If you haven’t, then you aren’t looking close enough! So to put everyone on an even playing field let’s search for something on Google together. Type in the search term “Derek Jeter jersey” then hit search and awaiting for you are your Google search results. Now look closely, do you see anything on the page that you never saw before? The answer could be found in BOTH organic & paid search listings. The answer to my question is the little blue magnifying glass just sitting there staring you right in the face…obviously for marketers and clients alike, the next question will be what is this?

In November of last year Google took Instant to a new level on Google.com with Instant Previews. Instant Previews provides a graphic overview of a search result and highlights the most relevant sections, making finding the right page quick and easy.

Now, Google is bringing the same benefit to ads with Instant Previews for Ads. The Instant Previews icon will appear next to ads on Google.com allowing users to preview the ad’s landing page. With Instant Previews, your customers are able to quickly preview a page to see if its content matches what they’re searching for.

Benefits:

• Helps you get even more highly-qualified traffic to your site
• Clicks are free of charge — you’re only charged if a user clicks through to your actual landing page.

Since the preview on Google shows your landing page, I would HIGHLY recommend polishing up that  page - Instant Preview will show you how incredibly important a good landing page is. Users should not be sent to a generic page, but instead should be taken directly to what they are looking for! If you don’t do this, you are defeating the whole purpose of Google’s newest, free of charge, search innovation.

Do online search campaigns lead to in-store sales? That is a question very often asked to us in our industry and after a few studies that have been completed (mostly by Google), I think it is safe to say, they most certainly do!

Online advertising is just one of the levers a business can use to generate sales to their actual storefront. But most businesses don’t understand the full value of running a search campaign online or how the online components work with the offline components. The most difficult part in all of this is measuring just how much the search campaign is lifting the in-store sales. Google recently partnered with an outside firm to quantify the numbers to answer the question by establishing “online to store” experiments. What they did was saturate the test markets in a controlled manner with certain products. Then a comparison was done comparing the sales of a particular product/area before, during, and after the online search campaign was running while normalizing all metrics due to seasonality.

Some of the numbers that come out of those studies further backed up what we all think but at times have a hard time proving – Online advertising helps promote off-line sales. In one example, a large advertiser ran search ads for generic keywords to see if they would influence in-store sales. Test stores showed a lift of 1.7% for in-store conversions  and a positive return on their ad spend.

Another national retailer targeted 59 test markets with keywords specific to one product category and saw a 2% life on their in-store sales. Stores that usually underperformed in that same category saw sales increase by 5.3%.

Finally, another national retailer wanted to see if online coupons drove in-store sales. That resulted in a 2.5% lift in the promoted categories & a 1.6% increase in overall store sales due to the halo effect. This same retailer came to the conclusion that online ads are greater than or equal to sending out weekly circulars and actually have a better ROAS, while they earned $10 to ever $1 spent with this method.