Mountain View, California — The latest thing to emerge from Google’s barrage of launches this week. Google has now officially debuted a fresh form of advertising called “AdWords Comparison Ads,” a special kind of ad that delivers an instant mortgage quote service that connects lenders to buyers in real time, and provides useful tools for comparison shopping that lets consumers compare offers from multiple advertisers.
“If you are searching for a mortgage, you really care about a specific offer. You want to know the APR and based on your specific circumstances, which is something that AdWords does not provide today,” said Nick Fox, director of business product management for AdWords at Google.
The mortgage rate feature displays new “comparison ads” that it is introducing in a limited test, selling space in free tools that consumers may use before making big-ticket purchases.
To begin using, Google is campaigning the ads for inquiries corresponding to the mortgage market, though it eventually plans to spread out beyond that.
Initially, the feature is being directed at the mortgage market, so that mortgage advertisers — who have historically been among the biggest search advertisers — can better target their ads.
The ads are in a controlled roll-out for now, with only some users in some states seeing them. Users who search for certain words, such as “mortgage,” will have the option to specify some additional information, such as what type of loan they are interested in and what their income is. They will then see a list of offers that match those criteria, as shown in the example below.
Here is how Google describes the new ad type:
AdWords uses a host of targeting and relevancy signals to determine the best ads for each query. However, sometimes a user’s query does not provide enough information for us to confidently predict what they want. Take, for example, users who search for “mortgage.” Do they want a new home loan or a refinance? Do they want a fixed rate or an adjustable rate loan? Comparison Ads improves the ad experience on Google.com by letting users specify exactly what they are looking for and helping them quickly compare relevant offers side by side.
Users can also go straightaway to the comparison area here. The page lets you to filter rate offers based on size of loan, your credit rating, your gross income, state, county and other options.
Clicking on the ads based on your query takes you to a page where you can view a variety of related mortgage offers from various lenders, like this:
Google states that the new program is part of the company’s efforts to make “ads more relevant and useful.” And indeed, the company has been testing other ad formats lately that are aimed at specific types of advertisers. For instance, in late August, Google started letting some entertainment advertisers include videos in their search ads — and Google has also allowed e-commerce advertisers to include images in their ads. In its announcement of the comparison ads, Google hints that it may introduce the format for some other categories, saying it will “increase … the number of advertisers able to participate.”
Fox says there is an assortment of reasons preventing universal coverage at the moment, such as some regulatory issues plus that they simply do not have enough advertisers on board in some places to provide a robust product.
Ads are sold on a cost-per-lead basis. When someone clicks to receive a quote, the advertiser is forwarded the information and billed. The advertiser also receives no personal information about the person. In fact, they do not even get the person’s real phone number. Google provides a temporary bridging number that connects the advertiser to the customer. After that, it is up to the customer to provide their own “real” number if they want follow-up, Fox said.
While mortgages are being offered to begin with, Google also anticipates that other products eventually will be added.
“We do not have anything to announce in terms of the future areas this will expand in. We will learn from the mortgages experiment, how well it is working, where it is working and based on that, we will have a better sense of other places to expand the product to,” Fox said.