If you haven’t been paying attention, Google’s been busy experimenting with showing product images and shopping results more prominently in search results.
Yesterday Adam Viener posted an eye-opening screenshot of Google Search results. A search for USB extension cable showed search results containing a very skewed list of search results.
In Adam’s example, PC Connection’s products garnered three top spots in the sponsored listings. From Adam’s perspective as a search affiliate, this raises some questions about the availability of ad space to businesses like his.
Here’s another example where Zappos pwns the search results page.
Angel Djambazov asked Google Affiliate Network team about the recent changes to the search results page and got the following response:
We can confirm that the product listing ads beta discussed in Adam’s piece is being facilitated by the Google Affiliate Network platform. At Google, we’re constantly experimenting with new features, tools and visual representations to improve the user experience and usefulness of our ads. In accordance with that philosophy, we’re beta testing a new format to show richer product information, including images, prices and product titles in the ads for shopping-related queries. This test is part of a limited beta and not available to all advertisers at this time.
What do you think of these trends?
I'm Scott Jangro and I've been around the affiliate marketing space a long time. I've seen publisher businesses come and go. Heck, I've seen business models come and go. AffBook is about building sustainable web publishing businesses and funding them with what I think is the best way possible -- affiliate marketing.
