Google “Offer Ads” — Not Google Offers — In The Wild

I innocently searched on “webhosting” this afternoon and saw this result, with an ad unit I’d never seen before: a coupon embedded in the ad copy.

I knew that Google was testing “Offer Ads,” not to be confused with Google Offers, but I’d never seen one myself. If you click “view offer” you get the following screen, which was being shown during the Google Wallet launch demo.

If you save the offer, you’re whisked away to the “My Offers” dashboard, which is a repository for several deal types that Google appears to have up its sleeve. Click “save to my offers” and here’s what shows up thereafter:

Ultimately all saved offers or deals reside in the same area as Google Offers (daily deals).

This is noteworthy because it shows Google’s “offers” portfolio is going to be larger than daily deals and success is not entirely contingent upon that individual product. Google intends to enable advertisers to broadly get in on the Offers/Wallet infrastructure.

This also shows how Google will connect AdWords to offers and later redemption, for a kind of “closed loop” or quasi-closed-loop transaction. Google will likely provide analytics on the number of CTRs that lead to “saves” that in turn lead to redemptions — online or off. Indeed the Offers-Wallet “value chain” will lead all the way from the SERP to the point of sale.