by SEO & Affiliate Consultant
M. Thomson
On April 7, Google owned display advertising giant DoubleClick teamed up with Adgregate Markets, a service that will see the company's transactional ShopAds included in DoubleClick's offering. Inevitably, this will allow users to transact totally within a display banner advertisement - pretty innovative, huh?M. Thomson
Well, bigmouthmedia may have spotted a way that would allow users to convert within the Google search results. "No way!" I hear you say. Well, in the words of Bill & Ted (of Excellent Adventure repute) - yes way!
The key lies with Google Subscribed Links (sub-offering of Google Co-op). Subscribed Links allow webmasters to create custom search results that users can add to their Google search results page.
Take, for example, Drugs.com. They have created Subscribed Links to conveniently show users more details on particular drugs.
Subscribed Links have much more functionality than just 'site links' though - you can also embed Google Gadgets within the search results. Now, if you take Subscribed Links, Google Gadgets and add a little sprinkle of innovation, you can create custom search results that would allow a user to transact within the search results.
How?
Well, first you will need to create an XML file hosting all your Subscribed Links details. After doing so, you can design the look and feel of your Subscribed Links, add hyperlinks and so on.
Now, in order to add the transactional process, you will need to dynamically create a Gadget that has checkout possibilities. Basically, create a smaller version of your website's checkout (removing navigation etc), and then make it available via an iFrame. Gadgets can contain variables that you can use to pre-populate their contents. For example, if you take a Google search result for a transactional search term, all you need to do is simply pre-populate the Gadgets checkout data and your users could transact within the search results for that product.
In tried-and-tested BBC Blue Peter fashion, here's one we made earlier:
While this functionality may be available, whether Google would allow it is another matter. It's worth remembering that Google did remove playback of videos from the Google search results, so not everything the engine is capable of right now will be here to stay. Additionally, before you all go rushing to create Subscribed Links, take note that a user must subscribe to your feed (like how RSS works). This is part of the drawback and why we may not have seen the full potential of Google Subscribed Links just yet.
