Google testing Remarketing in combined text/image ads

Today I stumbled upon a combined AdSense ad format that – in the middle of the usual text ads – shows a remarketing item of booking.com. (Obviously was looking for a hotel for SMX Munich this week 😉 )

Although remarketing in the GDN is not new of course, I’ve never seen advertisers that have been granted a small image in those ‘text ads’. Since Priceline/Booking.com is one of the biggest spenders on Google AdWords over all this is likely to be a beta test with a very exclusive group of advertisers.

Conclusions

1. I’d suppose this to be a combination of Contextual Dynamic Creatives (CDC, actually in beta now – also see Dynamic Display Ads) and Remarketing. Booking.com would make sense to be one of the first partners to test it.

2. It’s just a matter of time until Product Listing Ads (PLA) will be integrated I guess. Most likely with Remarketing as well, as CTR tends to be way better.

3. Finally “AdSense for Products” is there, with ads also showing small product pictures. Since nearly a decade publishers and advertisers were looking for a combination of AdSense/GDN and something like chitika.com or ebay relevance ads.

4. This might make a lot of advertisers activate Dynamic Search Ads (DSA), as this could be a very quick way to push all your inventory (from the organic index) into this retargeting system.

I’m sure AdSense publishers will be excited about this, as it will increase the AdSense CTR significantly and reduce ad blindness – hence result in a higher eCPM. On the other hand Google is targeting the potential revenues of other remarketing services like Criteo or Sociomantics as well as comparison shopping engines and meta searches which are already facing a hard time.

I’m curious if – like usual – just retailers and booking engines will be allowed to participate, or if this ad feature will be available for metas and aggregators as well – possibly not?