Instant Google: goodbye exact match advertising

Written by: Jonathan Briggs

September 10, 2010 [14245 views]

Pay-per-click advertising was revolutionary. As an advertiser you could bid on exact phrases that searches might type in Google and when they did your ad would be shown and you would be charged if they clicked. Perfect for all parties, except it appears Google, who have realised that they can make more money by reducing the accuracy of this laser targeting: showing ads when somebody only might want what you offer.

In my opinion this can only be bad for smaller advertisers and lesser known brands. There is now much more similarity between search advertising and display advertising. With Google Instant, introduced this week, we are back in the traditional model where advertising is disruptive and often intrusive. This will probably make a lot more money for Google but I wonder whether the beauty of the pay-per-click model has now been lost.

Google Instant, shows advertising (and search results) as you type your query; in an instant. As I type an S, for example, Google realises that I might be looking for Sky and shows an ad. I pause momentarily to see what it has displayed and type a U. Now The Sun is shown both as an advertisement and as the first organic result. I hit B and discount coupon ads for Subway are shown. But today I am looking for my client Subaru and although they are in the suggested searches, it takes an A to reveal their current ad.

The effect on me as a searcher is profound. My train if thought is jogged by ads and results for irrelevant but powerful brands. This is broad reach display advertising rather than search advertising.

Questions about Google Instant

The effect on advertisers is unclear and we will all need to experiment in the next few weeks and really measure the effect.

Should a brand bid for shortened versions of its name: Subaru for Su, Sub, Suba and how competitive (and expensive) will these terms become? My prediction is that there will be a land grab for these words in the short term.

If visitors are disrupted by adverts that Google shows prematurely will this result in large numbers of extra impressions with few clicks and lower the quality score of ads raising costs.

How will we understand which visitors have used Google Instant and who have turned it off? We will need to see how this can be tracked inside Analytics and we will need to compare ROI.

This will further separate planning campaigns for mobile, search and display networks as the user behaviour will be different in each environment which will raise campaign design costs.

Will the long tail (highly specific multi word phrases) become useless as searchers forget their query and are diverted by early results and ads?

Will searchers change their searching behaviour as typing queries such as “How do I...” or “Where can I...” will delay useful results for too long? It will be fascinating to see whether the frequency of location based searches, plumbers SE1, also changes.

The impact on search engine optimisation will also be profound. Google has tweaked its algorithm recently and together with Instant, Maps, Images and Products the effect is to make the first two positions even more valuable than before; as later results are pushed even further below the fold. This makes SEO significantly harder.

These are big challenges for brands, agencies and perhaps for Google. Let’s see how it develops.