Google rocked the pay-per-click (PPC) advertising world today by releasing “Product Ads”. These ads, targeted to consumer product retailers, display a product image right on the search results page.

This is big news on its own as image-ads get clicked on significantly more than standard text-ads. But the bigger news is that big advertisers (those with their own Google account representatives) can now start bidding on a pay-per-sale basis. This means they no longer have to pay for unprofitable clicks. Only when they make a sale do they share part of the revenue with Google. Pretty awesome right? It gets bigger.

Advertisers will have to option to allow Google to handle all the keyword management automatically. That means that instead of building out (and managing) their own keyword lists, they can leave it in Google’s capable (and highly motivated) hands.

Do you think this is a good move? Will customers appreciate handing over the keyword reigns to Google or does it take away advertiser control?