The US search engine giant has introduced a new feature known as expandable ads on Adsense blogs or websites, according to a blog post published by the Adsense team on Wednesday. So bascially how does this type of advertising works? Just think of Digg’s impressive user log-in interface. Google uses rich media advertising and when a particular interested reader finds an advertisement useful to him or her, it’ll expand beyond the original size of the ad unit. The main aim of implementing this option is that it allows more interaction for potential customers since there is more space available as compared to the original text-based or image advertising. As explained by Arlene, a member from the Adsense team explained that “expandable ads may stream a movie trailer, show video game clips, or display various views of an item for sale”.

Currently, only advertisers based in the United States are testing out these expandable ads to promote their websites or products but will expand its reach to an international soon. Expandable ads isn’t a single ad option and it’s incorporated with the image ads. For example, if you’ve already enabled images ads on your blog, ads will automatically expand when a user is interested in it, provided that there is an adequate number of advertisers who are willing to try out this new feature. Bloggers earn revenue from ads by CPC (Cost Per Click) which simply means that earnings will be credited in your Adsense account whenever a visitor head to the advertiser’s landing page instead of just clicking to expand the ads.

In my own opinion, the implementation of expandable ads by the folks at Google is really wonderful since it significantly boost interaction of user and of course more making publishers more profitable. However, there are still some downsides with Google’s new launch of this ad format. For example, some publishers don’t really like this expandable ads feature because they won’t make any earnings when a user expands an image ad and therefore less income for them since not all expansions will definitely lead to the landing page which results in more money. Also, due to the fact that a sub-category of Google Image Ads, hence bloggers find it irksome to completely opt out from the brand-new format. This can be done using the Competitive Filter and the Ad Review Center.