Like them or not, product images at the top of Google search results are commonplace now, and accepted by users without question. But with exceptions, they’ve usually been a gallery of ‘shopping’ results, leading to online sales pages. And for many B2B advertisers, there often aren’t enough suppliers selling directly online (and advertising this way) to trigger the lineup of links and images. This means that most of the search results pages where you and your products feature are probably just plain text.
However, Google Ads users are now able to provide images to go alongside their ads, and it’s an option that most advertisers will want to use.
At present, the use of these new ‘image extensions‘ is limited; Google decides if and when these images will show alongside the advert, and on what devices (we’ve only seen them on mobile results so far). They can only be specified at the ad group level, but that shouldn’t be an issue in well-structured accounts. Advertisers can give Google a choice of images to use, or by opting in to ‘dynamic image extensions’ allow Google to use any image from the landing page.
Best practices for image extensions include to specify image extensions and dynamic image extensions; standard extensions that you provide will always serve over the dynamic ones. Consider offering landscape images as well as the compulsory square ones. Make the image extension useful, but keep it simple.