Google Video Ads May Soon Appear On SERPs

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

Two things from Google today:

1. Google Universal Search is still a ways from providing total user value
2. Video ads may soon appear on Google SERPs, but there is still hesitation

Both of these announcements, in a MediaPost story this morning, show some promise, but Google is not a company that acts decisively at the expense of wisdom.

Google spent years experimenting and discussing Universal Search long before it rolled out the beta version. They still have not incorporated every search query into the new technology. That’s because Google executives want to ensure that the user search experience is clean and easy.

On video ads, Google’s Director of Product Management, Sundar Pichai, had this to say:

“the images and video ads you see today on content networks are not what will work. They won’t carry over well.” Any steps Google makes will have to be “incremental and evolutionary.”

I applaud the search engine giant for that bit of wisdom. You don’t want to move too soon. Many display video ads you see online are detracting and unnecessary. I’m glad Google doesn’t want to go that route. I would hope the displays would be smaller – about the size of Google’s PPC ads. Perhaps they would appear as thumbnails and pop up into bigger ads when clicked upon. This will obviously be discussed at great length by the Google executives and decision makers, but that’s one way of looking at it.

How would you like to see Google video ads appear, if at all?