Google Unveils Image Search Ads — Your Ads Now With Picture Thumbnails

At its search event today, Google launched a new product that’s a part of Google Images: Google Image Search Ads. Basically, this allows anyone to advertise alongside Google Image searches in a new, more visual way.

“This allows you to reach hundreds of million of users who are searching on Google on a daily basis,” director of search products Ben Ling says. And Google Images is actually doing over a billion pageviews a day, Google says.

The ads will appear along the top of image search — they contain both an image and text. These won’t interfere with organic search results at all, Google says. They will be clearly marked as sponsored links, with a different color background, Google’s VP of search product and user experience Marissa Mayer says.

Mayer notes that there have always been ads along Google Images, but this is taking it to the next level with the thumbnails. And actually, certain select retailers have been able to use thumbnails with the help of Google before — but these new image ads will be open for anyone to use.

For now, these ads will only appear on the page for Google Image search, but Ling said they’ll explore rolling the ads out to other Search products eventually.

This new launch comes alongside a complete revamp of Google Images — the biggest change since it launched in 2001. Users will now have infinite scrolling and larger thumbnails.