Google AdWords Testing Video Ads

Back in February, Google introduced video ads testing on search results pages. It’s no big surprise that with Google’s Universal Search, video content is being added to editorial results, especially given the positive acceptance by searchers so far. Video ads are just the natural progression.

However, there’s been an ongoing debate in the industry, whether video ads really fit well in search results. In terms of relevancy to searches, particularly of that type of information and in video format, the obvious answer is, Yes. But we’ve also come across opinions that people do not necessarily see videos as ads. Well, we disagree.

We can think of scenarios when users searching for things as “cooking recipes” or “windsurfing tips and seeing a video ad with these exact phrases written under it are clicking on it and engaging more with the content than with a typical text ad. Moreover, when Google adds a thumbnail picture to the video ads, that would further boost engagement. We anticipate a plethora of other formats coming up too, as users get a taste for videos and Google keeps chasing better and better search experience.