• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, November 25, 2024

Ads began serving up Lens a couple of months ago, but Google shopping ads will now appear at the top of the page. The ad experience shown in Lens is based on the visual match of the image photographed or shown to the platform, and Google’s understanding of the product to surface the most relevant ads.

The visual world has become more vivid. Earlier this month, Google officially announced Google Lens features to improved shopping and payment security.

Lens is used for nearly 20 billion visual searches monthly, and 20% of those searches are focused on shopping.

Helping consumers to make more informed decisions when shopping in stores, Google Lens can show product insights specific to that store. Snapping and searching on a photo will serve up more product information and similar products in-stock, whether a store's price is competitive and shopper reviews.

While ads related to the content or images serve up similar to the way Google shows ads based on text searches, consumers through that snapshot share information with Google that the products are at a specific store, and they are of interest.

Google Pay also added more options related to buy now, pay later, after adding Affirm and Zip earlier this year.

Users can now use Afterpay as an option when checking out with Google Pay. Klarna support is coming soon, as well as a pilot service to help merchants better identify fraudulent transactions.

AI image recognition technology made the advancement possible. Technology is powered by Google’s Shopping Graph or more than 45 billion product listings, in-stock inventory data from a range of retailers and our Gemini models to bring you an entirely new way to shop in-store.

Seventy-two percent of Americans say they use their smartphone while shopping in-store, and more than half say they have left a store without making a purchase because they did not feel confident enough to buy the product.

The feature is available in the Google and Chrome apps for Android and iOS for U.S. users who have opted into sharing their location.

Google Maps enables local product inventory searches, but the company has dabbled with that idea for years tied to Merchant Center. The brand had to enroll and add the products in Merchant Center, assign products to specific stores, and activate local inventory ads or free local listings.

In 2019, the feature centered on Maps. And at the time, the company said there were 350 times more searches for keywords "local" and "near me” compared with the prior 10 years.

The plan originally was to expand and add campaign tools to help businesses send directions to consumers and increase phone calls and traffic to stores. The company called the feature Google Promoted Pins for Maps to offer a new way for businesses to highlight their locations. Google Maps.

Tapping on location pins in Maps, which Google at the time estimated people do hundreds of millions of times weekly, would give businesses the ability to feature their locations when people search for directions.