Google AdWords has announced the expansion of their Product Listing adverts, which are now available to US advertisers. These ads allow retailers to promote their product inventory as part of their AdWords listings and during the beta trial period, Google says that the results showed that people were twice as likely to click on a Product Listing Ad as they are to click on a standard text ad in the same location.

These Product Listing Ads enable users to see the exact products being offered before they even click through to the website, so they can be a way of increasing or filtering searchers to the site, which in turn should lead to higher quality visits and higher ROI.

Like Product Extensions -which lets advertisers add the pictures and prices of relevant products to the keyword-targeted text ads, Product Listing Ads makes it easy to show the most relevant products from a Google Merchant Center account to potential customers searching on Google. However, unlike Product Extensions, Product Listing Ads don’t require any keywords or ad text since the ads are automatically triggered whenever someone’s search matches an item in the Merchant Center account, making it easy to show relevant ads from the entire product inventory.

Once these options are established in the US, it's likely that they will be rolled out to other markets, in particular those that already use Google Product Search.