Another interesting fact learned at the Channel Intelligence Retail Summit: According to David Stewart, Google’s Platform Marketing Manager, Commerce & Analytics – text ads with the Google Checkout icon are seeing a 10% higher click-through rate and a 40% higher conversion rate.

That’s a very nice additional CTR and obviously a huge average improvement in conversion rate.

Since higher CTR drives ‘quality score’ and should raise average position, or allow you to maintain a position at a lower bid, Google is delivering quite an incentive to put at least some of your payment business through G-Checkout. I’m going to see if our case-study client at OnlyNaturalPet.com would be willing to add Google-Checkout support so we can see the impact for ourselves.

While they clearly want to drive those transactions, this does seem a bit unfair to advertisers spending hundreds of thousands or millions to run paid ads but who don’t want to adopt Google Checkout, and now find themselves effectively penalized as a result (for those keywords where competitors have the Checkout icon).

If you look at a page of results with the Google-Checkout enhanced listings it’s clear they draw extra attention. Once there are a bunch of them on the page I think they actually make it harder to read the text ads. I wonder whether these icons will last for enternity or only until the Google Checkout program reaches some target adoption level.

Even more interesting, what if Google let you ‘enhance’ your text-ad with a little graphic icon, either from a library or of your own choosing, for some small incremental fee? Sort of like eBay does with listing enhancements. Certainly would clutter and de-beautify the page, but if they’re willing to do it for Checkout, how about giving us all a shot?