Recently, Google announced a new advertising program called Shopping Actions, which unifies product searches across mobile, Google Assistant (including Google Home), and Google Express experiences. This will allow retail advertisers to place ads within multiple devices and Google shopping experiences, and give customers a universal shopping cart across each of these devices and products.

Google states that Shopping Actions will give customers “an easy way to shop your products on the Google Assistant and Search with a universal cart, whether they’re on mobile, desktop or even a Google Home device.”

Perhaps most interesting, Google will charge these retailers on a cost-per-sale basis, rather than the more traditional CPC model we are all familiar with. While Google has not shared any specifics around how this pricing model is structured, the ability for advertisers to pay only when sales are generated potentially makes it a more cost-effective and performance-based model.

As of now, this only impacts the retail vertical and doesn’t have any immediate impacts on EDU or other lead-based (rather than product-based) industries. However, this represents a huge shift in the paid search industry overall and helps shed some light on how Google is planning to monetize voice and other digital assistant-based searches going forward.

What do you guys think? Can you envision a future when someone will ask their digital assistant, “Hey Google, where should I go to school?”

Sarah Russell, Director Digital Media