Google have started working on a project that will allow users to have instant previews of ads as well as the normal previews that you are probably used to in the search engine result pages (SERPs). In case you have never seen instant preview let me take a moment to explain what it is.

When you conduct a search on Google then you will find that next to the name of the site there is a little magnifying glass icon. If you click on this then an image of the site is loaded so you can get a feel for the site without clicking through to it. The idea being that you will only leave Google for a site that you find interesting.

Up until now this has only been available for the search engines organic results and not for the ads that Google serves on each of its pages. Now, however, you can see the same magnifying icon next to each ad, both those at the top of a page of search engine results and also those on the right hand side of the page.

The reason I think that this will be so beneficial is that it will help you to decide whether an ad is worth clicking on or not. If you so an advert that said something along the lines of “Best Search Engine Optimisation. Get To Number 1 on Google” then you might very well be tempted to click on the ad. If when you get to the site it looks shabby and unprofessional then you will probably hit your “Back” button. With this new feature you will be able to see what the site looks like and let this help to influence your choice on whether to visit the site or not.

From the actual advertiser, who is paying on a Pay Per Click basis, then they have an increased chance of turning clicks into sales. They will know that they have won half the battle when a user clicks through to the site.

I do not know at this stage if Google will be feeding back to advertisers how many times that their ad has been previewed, if they do then this information would be immensely useful to an advertiser. Think of the structure of the data like this:

• Number of times ad has been shown
• Number of times ad has been Instant Previewed
• Number of Click Throughs

With this data an advertiser will be able to tell a number of things. For instance if a lot of people click the instant preview but never click through to the site then you know that your landing page needs some work doing on it as the site does not tempt enough people to visit it. If you know a high proportion of users who click the Instant Preview icon go on to visit the site then you know the look and feel of your site is fine but that there is something else going wrong when users get to your site.

Finally, from Google’s perspective the Instant Preview option is also very useful. If users can preview a page it means that they will only visit sites that really interest them, this means that they are more likely to trust the ads that they see. The fact that the advertiser knows that the people that click through to their site are more than casually interested means that they are getting more targeted leads and this is likely to lead to a more successful overall advertising campaign. A successful advertising campaign is likely to lead to repeat business for Google.

So you see, you, me, the advertisers and Google all stand to benefit from this change.