With Google’s stock down $100 in the past two weeks, the company all of a sudden isn’t so shy about pulling every advertising lever it can reach. So far this week, we’ve seen new click-to-buy buttons on YouTube (YouTubevertorials), AdSense for Flash games, and now text ads are appearing at the bottom of Google Maps. This may be bucket testing, but when I enter “New York City hotels” on Google Maps, I get a single line below with text ads for the Crowne Plaze Times Square and the Ramada New York. (An arrow lets you cycle through the ads).
Other bloggers around the world have noticed the same thing, including Amit Agarwal in India and David Shaw in the UK. The ads are local business ads, but seem to be triggered by the search terms.
What’s disappointing about these ads is that instead of taking you to a pushpin on the map itself showing you the location of the business doing the advertising, it takes you to the Website of that business like a normal search ad. But this is more about Google turning on a gusher of ad inventory that it was ignoring before than about creating an elegant map-based advertising experience. According to comScore, 131 million unique visitors worldwide checked out Google Maps in August. They generated 1.3 billion pageviews. That’s a lot of untapped ad inventory.
Where will we see Google place ads next?
They are probably getting paid only when a user visits the website of that local business. By linking directly to the website, it helps them increase their conversion rates.
They will probably make this available via the Google Maps API. If so, linking directly to the website of that business makes more sense.
I highly doubt that this is in response to anything as near term as the performance of the stock over the past few weeks.
Eric, I really wish journalists like you would understand the lead time required on projects like this at big companies. Likely, this has been in the works 6–12 months: on the product roadmap, prioritized with other work, designed, implemented, tested, iterated, and finally launched.
This particular feature also requires coordination with another internal team (Ads) which adds even more overhead to the process. This is not something that was done overnight in a knee-jerk reaction to the neuroses of stock market investors.
While Google certainly has been working on this for a ling time they also certainly pushed to get this stuff out sooner to counteract the stock ‘crisis’. In a better market they might have taken more time. In current times it’s certainly convenient that they had all this stuff in the pipe. Big picture the big ship is just continuing its course.
How do you know Google hasnt been planning this move for years? Just because it wasnt released until now, doesnt mean that they havent thought about creating the functionality and maintaining it to be used in a rainy day scenario. And believe me, as a stockholder of Google, its pouring right now.
How bad does it have to get before they turn the ads on in mashups? That’s a ton of inventory that they’re not monetizing.
If you look carefully – they do display advertiser push pins on the map as well. That particular search provides three custom icons, one for each advertiser.
Christian
Ruby On Rails Jobs
http://www.rorjobs.com
Erick, seems they have pulled the trigger: http://maps.goo...new+york+hotels
The ads are actually pointing to the physical locations on the map.
At least for me (I’m in Mexico right now).
Google, as intrusive as ever!
Dave C is right i mean it took 10 years for them to launch the suggestion feature that still pulls up 58 million results for dentists. spam results 101.
SuggestionLocator.com
I can understand. We are in tough times.
I thought they added advertising to maps a while ago. I remember seeing additional tabs in the infowindow that had ads.
Guess it was a map hack.
I advertise on Google Local + Google Maps and have been doing so for a long time now.
The conversion of these ads is superb for me. Then again, I know what I am doing.
I don’t think this is something that’s entirely new. Adwords already show up below the location listings for a while now, and they’ve simply expanded the ads’ exposure by bringing them up to the bottom of the map (in addition to below the fold).
I had been seeing these ads on Google Maps for almost two weeks now. Guess I was among those selected for bucket testing.
These ads have been around for at least a week now.
How’s this for an opening “with the stock market tanking, TechCrunch is pulling every finance related angle they can in their posts ….”
I think that we’ll all begin to see a lot more of this as companies scramble to compensate for revenue given the market’s current state.
Evan
http://www.beyondrace.com
And all for 0.008% CTR @ $2.35 CPM. Strength in numbers, I guess.
That cannot be their real CTR, can it? I thought the average Google user was far stupider.
I suspect that the biggest map usage comes from their JavaScript API rather than maps.google.com. It will be interesting to see how Google is going to monetize all of their widgets (JS map embeds).
We’ve noticed these ads early last week. Personally, I think this is just a test run before a big push on the API front.
So far, Google didn’t do a a good job with their geo-targeted ads api. They certainly have the critical mass of publishers. I am curious to see what they roll-out next.
I was expecting this. I also expect, Google with start to Monetize; Google Real Estate, Google Books, Google Docs and Google Calendar soon.
Expect more of this, public companies are all about valuation. Valuation is a fucntion of earnings and multiple, in a slowing environment espect multiples and earnings to come down which affects wealth. Businesses will be willing to negotiate more now and the consumer with cash will alsohave leverage.
just imagine how much wealthier google founders would be if thay had ads on all their asset from the jump. i am quite surprise google maps didnt come with text ads out of the box.
That Jeremy Stamper sure is one dumb chicken fucker.
Holy comment spam, batman. Please cease.
Google launched Local Business Ads some time ago. I have used them for several months personally to promote some business I work with. I believe all that’s changed is the presentation. The ads used to appear on the map and in the left-hand column under the unpaid results. Now they added the bar below the map that repeats the first paid listing. It’s more of a design change than a new ad product unless I’m missing something.
Businesses can make this work for them too – by inverting the process.
By using geographic keywords in their SEO that use local place names (neighborhood, point of interest) that has greater search volume than their store or service.
When someone searchers for a place name in their neighborhood, they will show in the results. SEOGIS helps businesses do this, which is really an inverse of Google Map Adwords (where Google benefits) to where businesses benefit from Google.
Chris
Hey, everyone has to make their money somehow these days.. times are tough!
Really,
Suggested this back when I was at G. And got told off for it. hah!
Still don’t get it. Gmaps inventory is more valuable for display advertisers than for CPC
Google is investing heavily in mobile, is the company’s priority now.
It’s a nice way to show ads for the publishers, such as restaurant, supermarket……
Google need to grow more rapidly.
I don’t see the problem, google has to make money. So there are three real options.
1. continue to offer all your maps for free, not making but infact loosing money (money for hosting, bandwith, satilite photos, geodecoding, and so on)
2. charge people a fee to use the service (user levels would drop off)
3 place ads, and I don’t think googles ad placements are in the way.
What is the real question is when will they announce a change to their maps api and return these ads to 100% of their maps, effecting every website using a google map to show locations? That will come one day, I wonder when, and I can just imagine the backlash…
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from video, map, I think next step is mobile.
GPhone is the perfect platform to put AD on, maybe by text or geo-location.
I can’t come out a reason why Google will ignore it.
Would be interesting to see when they get desperate enough to put ads on their ‘holy’ first page
booooo!
http://lampshademusic.com
http://lampshad...sic.typepad.com
I’ve got to agree that this has nothing to do with their stock price dropping. Everyone in the country’s stock price is dropping, but it’s not having an affect on the massive profits they are taking in.
Google should serve geo-targeted mobile ads (via maps) that allow mom/pop shops to offer coupons to people in their vicinity.
Evan
http://www.iphone4um.com
Look at the little “R” in your screenshot, if you click that, you’ll see that *is* actually a sponsored link too. So you should have drawn 2 big red arrows on that screenshot
I am not suprised that they have done this, and just wonder how soon they will add it for all mashups as is surely coming.
my 2 cents, Google needs to pay to put the maps on the internet, and to expect all of their services to be free especially something as helpful as Google Maps is just Naive. As long as it does not hinder the usefulness of Google Maps then I am cool with it.
google only wants MONEY, forget about user, google wants money
I’ve create a website using Google Maps and would love to hear some feedback on layout, color scheme, ease of navigation etc….
The site is: http://www.thet...icitiesbest.com
Thank you in advance for your time,
Sean B. Halliday
google only wants MONEY, forget about user, google wants money
great!
google is really doing a good job and very help to the masses out there.
I think we can declare that Google enters a new age.
good works and nice works
thank you
Every one looks for more opportunities to monetize their virtual estate and that’s what Google is doing by putting up text ads in the google maps.
Great stuff! thanks for sharing
Good works and nice works, very thanks
I think google is really doing a good job for mi.
WTF Mate