AdWords Offer Extensions - SERP tinkering continues

As long as AdWords has been around, Google has tinkered and evolved the product, making subtle changes such as background colours, right through to adding more controversial features such as product image ads (thus straying from the basic text format that has always been synonymous with the medium).

The latest one, spotted in the wild recently, was the inclusion of an 'offers extension':

There has been documentation about this for a while at the Google Ad Innovations site, and it's worth noting the difference between the example shown above and the one provided by Google – the former being far more prominent on the search results page, forgoing the single hyperlink for a call-to-action button.

There are two scenarios available to advertisers when choosing to use the offers extension:

1) Users click through to the advertiser's site which will provide a redemption code or similar for use online
2) Upon clicking the button, users are taken to a Google hosted offer page which gives the option to print of save to 'My Offers'

It's this last option that may give the biggest hint as to the greater scheme within which this small change lies.

At the moment Google Offers is currently undergoing a pretty gradual roll out, only available in select U.S. cities. From the size of figures being thrown around as a valuation for Groupon, and the spate of clones/copycats using their business model, it's clear that the market here is absolutely huge.  This leads me to believe that this will become a big part of the business strategy for Google this year.

It also seems to me that within this AdWords tie-in may lie a couple of Google's big USPs over Groupon et al:

- By offering companies who are using AdWords the chance to run offers alongside their ads there is a big incentive in terms of improving CTRs (which in turn will affect quality scores and adverts)
 - Potentially, Google could run adverts on relevant keywords for any live offers, raising awareness of the products and driving huge amounts of traffic. The effect of this is that they could stay in the number 1 position for a whole range of keywords, as with credit card comparison search terms.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out over the next year. As with 'Search, plus your world' it's yet another example of Google filling in the gaps between products.  As this is something we can expect to see a lot more of in the coming months, what effect will this have on the SERPS?  Many in the SEO industry are beginning to feel that there is too much rich content and advertising within the Google results, so will the time come where the results page is viewed as being too far removed from the initial uncluttered, useful product?