Google wants to make ads more useful by showing prices for services within them

By Christian de Looper July 19, 2016

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It’s about to get a whole lot easier to find the prices of goods and services through Google. The search giant is launching a change to its ads to show prices for services straight from search — without having to click through to the website in question.

The new feature is called “price extensions,” and it essentially shows a menu of a company’s goods and services, along with how much they cost.

“Whether it’s weekend baseball tickets or temporary storage space, people want to know what their options are and how much they cost before deciding what to buy,” said the company in a blog post.

When price extensions are shown in ads, they’ll appear as rows of information, which will include the name of the service, a short description, and the price of the service, along with a link to the appropriate page for the service on the company’s website.

Of course, the new feature is helpful for users who want to be able to quickly and easily see prices for products and services, but it’s also apparently great for businesses who are doing the advertising. According to the blog post, ads with price extensions reportedly showed 18 percent higher click through rate compared to ads that didn’t show price extensions, at least for a company called Extra Space Storage.

Businesses can also create multiple price extensions with start and end dates — perfect for showing different prices during a promotion and ensuring that price remain accurate during the promotion and after it ends.

Price extensions will be an available option for all AdWords users over the next few days. The feature is only available in English, and currently will only show for mobile text ads being shown in the top ad position.

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Christian’s interest in technology began as a child in Australia, when he stumbled upon a computer at a garage sale that he…

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