Google Instant Previews for Ads Official, Already Available

As expected, Google has now officially launched Instant Previews for Ads, after the feature was spotted in testing last week. Google did provide more details, but there's nothing revolutionary here, technically and from a user's perspective, Instant Previews for Ads work just like the regular ones for any web page.

From the advertisers point of view, it should make click-troughs more valuable, therefore likely more expensive, since users will be more informed, but Google says, unsurprisingly, that it won't charge anything for the previews themselves.

"In November of last year we took Instant to a new level on Google.com with Instant Previews," Google's Dan Friedman wrote.

"Instant Previews provides a graphic overview of a search result and highlights the most relevant sections, making finding the right page as quick and easy as flipping through a magazine," he explained.

Instant Previews have been quite popular, at least gathering from the fact that Google has been expanding the feature and has launched a very slick mobile version of the functionality.

"Now, we’re bringing the same benefit to ads with Instant Previews for Ads. Starting today, the Instant Previews icon will appear next to ads on Google.com allowing users to preview the ad’s landing page," he announced.

"With Instant Previews, your customers are able to quickly preview a page to see if its content matches what they’re searching for," he added.

Google touts the fact that, with Instant Previews for Ads, advertisers will get higher quality traffic from their search ads since users will be more likely to be interested if they decide to click through after seeing the preview.

Of course, it's likely that most people, at least at first, won't be using Instant Previews, but it should make a difference nonetheless.

Higher quality traffic is something any advertiser hopes for, but the other side of the coin is that traffic numbers could be going down, though probably not by a significant margin at first.

Instant Previews for Ads is available on the main Google.com in English website, but it's rolling out to localized versions in the coming weeks, the company said.