Have you ever seen the ability to capture leads directly from search before, with email subscription directly in an ad? I just saw this on Google for the first time while sleuthing around trying to figure out the Decide.com announcement apparently happening tomorrow morning. I can’t currently find a way to create my own lead form in Google Adwords, and I haven’t ever seen this on any other search result. Is this the future, capturing leads without ever leaving the search results?
Looks Like It Worked
Subscribing to the email newsletter doesn’t take you off Google to Decide.com, you get a confirmation right in your search results. Google on!
Not Sure How I Missed This
The SEOmoz community were among the first to play with this feature, as one post in this thread says:
Yep its a communication ad extension – it wasn’t open to all advertisers at first. You need to check in your account to see if you can add this extention in camp/adword settings if you dont see it then contact adwords support, it was trialing, but might now be live for one and all…
It sounds like this feature is still in beta and limited to certain accounts. If I were so lucky as to have an account manager I’d hit him up, but in the meantime I’m curious to see who else is playing with this feature for customer aquisiton. It seems powerful.
I can’t imagine actually dropping my info in there, especially that early. Will be interesting to see how it converts.
You can imagine the next step where if you’re logged into your gmail account, it’s just a ‘click to sign up’, no typing needed. I can picture people more frequently giving info out that way (no typing, less realization your email is further getting spread on the net).
The feature is definitely very interesting.. one of those – wow this is really good, why weren’t people doing this earlier?. But, online ads are amongst the least trusted sources of information (Nielsen survey 2012) and this alone may not be the saviour 🙂
The biggest question for me (having been an advertiser) is whether I actually get the user’s email address or whether I have to send all updates to the newly subscribed user through some Google service (the way that people who “subscribe” to you on FeedBurner are only reachable by you via FeedBurner and not directly).
It’s been a feature for some time.
It’s not actually that effective for conversions.
You also have to trade off that or secondary links (you can’t have both)
For my flash sales business it’s not been a great tool. Much more effective to get them to our site and convert from there.
Now is that a good thing? The user never gets on your page. they stay on google.