Advertisement is, without a doubt, Google's bread and butter. So, it's not a big surprise that the company is constantly looking at ways of expanding the audience and tools it can make available to advertisers.
In a new blog post, the company's vice president of Product Management and Shopping, Surojit Chatterjee, outlined Google's intent to start experimenting with shoppable ads in image search results. The basic idea here is that advertisers could potentially place sponsored images among Google Images results. For example, if you search for "home offices", you'll see a few sponsored images with a shopping tag that, when you click on it, will identify the individual items of furniture found in an image, along with their pricing and other relevant details such as branding.
It's an interesting take on advertising, and an organic way of integrating ads into image searches. These ads will also not seem out of place as they would be relevant to your query. Plus, there's the simple matter that images are far more likely to convince you to buy a product. It also makes for a more compelling display if, instead of just showing you a table on its own, an advertiser can show you a beautifully decorated home office and then allow you to select the individual items in the picture that it's selling.
However, the functionality will only work on sponsored posts, meaning you won't be seeing shopping tags on literally every image result. The company is currently only testing this new way of displaying ads among a small percentage of its traffic and in concert with only a select few retailers at this time.
In addition, the company also announced it's bringing another of its ad experiences, Showcase Shopping ads, to Google Images as well.
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