How Google and Facebook are Enhancing the Web Ad Experience

Facebook and Google have both announced new advertising formats. Each company hopes that its new format will enhance the user’s experience, and provoke engagement between the brand and its potential customer. In a social media driven age, the more interaction that the ad evokes in potential customers, the greater success it has. With so many one-way advertisements being consumed on a daily basis by people, social media works to stand out by offering personable engagement for brands and customers.

It brings people back in time to when interaction and relationships are what built trust among local businesses and its customers. The same tactic applies to social media, but on a larger scale. Facebook and Google recognize the need for this, and both are working to provide user-friendly experience for advertisement consumers.

Google’s Vice President of Product Management, Nick Fox, stated that one-third of online advertisers that use search engines like Google as a medium, now use enhanced ad formats instead of text formats. These enhanced ads include: Product Ads that display the product image with the merchant name and produce price; Location Extensions, which reveal the business address on the ad; and Media Ads that include video in the advertisement.

In addition to all these established enhanced advertisement formats, Google is taking it a step further. In the spirit of making people feel more connected, Google will be launching online circular ads like you would find in the Sunday paper. These advertisements will feature multiple pictures and large type exactly like a newspaper design. Many big name companies have bought in to the idea and signed on. A couple of these companies include Best Buy and Macy’s Department Store. These advertisements have started circulating throughout the web today.

Meanwhile, Facebook has been hard at work developing its own new line of engaging ad for users. Facebook advertising developers believes that when an ad is recommended by a user’s friend that it will be more applicable to the user. Likewise, the recommendation of the friend aids in the probability that the user clicks to find out what the product or service is all about. It enhances the advertisement’s success rate as more and more friends of friend’s like the advertisement.

Now, instead of simply seeing that a friend has “liked” a particular advertisement, the user will experience an expandable ad display when a friend recommends, or “likes”, the ad. Also, users can now comment on the advertisement, sharing both positive and negative things about the ad itself, the product,or the company. When a user is first introduced to the expandable ad, he will have the ability to see both the ad and the comments made by his friend and by others on Facebook.

This is different than the present advertising campaign called Sponsored Stories, which only reveal the friend’s interaction with the company or product. Additionally, these new ads will feature a message from the advertiser and will not be featured within the Facebook user’s News Feed.

Whether these new ad formats will evoke engagement among the customers and its brand, or prove to aggravate consumers due to its intrusion is yet to be seen. Time will tell whether consumers are as happy with Facebook and Google’s new advertisement formats as the companies are.