Over the past several months, Google quietly expanded its Purchases on Google ad test to iOS devices.
The ads enable consumers to buy products directly on Product Listing Ads, or PLAs, which are the listings that show a product’s image, price and the retailer selling it prominently in Google search results for product-related searches.
The iOS ads feature a message that says, “Easy checkout” along with a credit card icon under the image in the ad. That’s a tweak from previous versions of Purchases on Google that featured a blue “Buy on Google” note at the of the ad. Google constantly experiments with where it displays those types of messages and icons, as well as the language that accompanies the ads, says a source familiar with Google’s approach.
While Google began testing Purchases on Google ads on Android devices in 2015, the search giant has been slow to roll the program out more broadly. However, Google’s Purchases on Google push appeared to pick up earlier this year when Google began listing a Purchases on Google option in its Merchant Center. The option says, “Help shoppers easily purchase on Google, so you can grow conversions and drive new customers.” To take part, retailers can click here to fill out the form.
Google also recently made a change that lengthens the amount of information displayed in snippets, the page description that details how a website relates to a search query that Google shows below the URL in its organic search results.
“We recently made a change to provide more descriptive and useful snippets, to help people better understand how pages are relevant to their searches,” a Google spokesman says. “This resulted in snippets becoming slightly longer, on average.”
The average snippet is now roughly 228 characters, up from 160 characters in mid-November. Google derives those descriptions from a site’s meta descriptions and the more relevant a snippet is to a shopper’s query, the more likely he is to click the site’s link.