Impact of ‘Google Instant’ on Your Online Marketing Campaigns

On the 8th of September 2010, Google launched its Instant Search interface, which shows results as you type, in real time. Searchers, particularly from the Search Engine Marketing (SEM) industry, have reacted sharply to the new interface. Many users find the new interface distracting, even annoying.

Google Instant is being sold as a faster and better User Interface

Matt Cutts from Google says that the change is more about rolling out a new User Interface (UI) rather than an algorithmic change. Matt attempted to allay the fears of the SEM industry by suggesting “SEO is not dead” but may change due to instant search query feedback to users, which in turn, may change their search behaviour. He believes that the searchers will diversify their queries within the scope of the original intent.

The effect of predicted query suggestions on user behavior

While Google claims that the Search Ranking Algorithm remains unchanged, the new feature will surely change search behaviour of users due to instant feedback mechanism. A lot of users are likely to select the predictive results, which fulfil their original intent, and stop typing further. Some users may get distracted from their original intent as ‘irrelevant but interesting’ results may lead to unintended searches. For example a user may digress into “home improvement loans” after typing “home improvement” instead of following his original intent of searching for “home improvement ideas.”

As more and more search users select “predicted query” suggestions, it would increase the traffic on the “head” keyword terms and lead to keyword aggregation. In essence, they would be searching more of what “other users” are searching. This usage trend would create a loop-back effect and drive out the long-tail keywords from the popular suggestions. Consequently, over a period of time, the long-tail keywords search count may diminish significantly. Where possible, Google is pushing local results for terms having local context like weather, pizza, movies, jobs etc.

The change in usage trend will throw new challenges to SEO & PPC professionals. They will need to focus their campaigns more on lead terms, creating a fiercer battleground.

How will PPC campaigns get impacted?

As per Google the AdWords impressions are counted in the following situations -

* The user begins to type a query on Google and clicks anywhere on the page (a search result, an ad, a spell correction, a related search).
* The user chooses a particular query by clicking the Search button, pressing Enter, or selecting one of the predicted queries.
* The user stops typing, and the results are displayed for a minimum of three seconds.

For PPC campaign managers, this is bad news. The AdWords impressions would unnecessarily increase due to ads display even during partial typing process. Ads would sometimes be displayed for irrelevant or partial keywords. For example, search intent for “Car Insurance” displays ads for “Car Rentals” just after the user has typed the word “car.” This means that the “Car Rentals” PPC campaigns will waste impressions, reducing their CTR.

Predictive query push of popular terms will diminish the long-tail keyword opportunities for PPC managers. Pressure will mount on the “head” terms of their campaigns; pushing up their CPC costs while wasted AdWords impressions will make their CTR poor. Since the CTR is likely to be affected across the board for most users, it is not clear how Google will treat the fall in the “Quality Score” of the ad campaigns.

In any case, PPC campaigns are likely to become costlier to run and the campaign managers will need to make frequent updates in their campaigns to target newer and popular keywords to keep up with the changing trends of search users. Some website owners may even consider diverting part of their PPC funds into SEO campaigns in order to get some traction of natural traffic and mitigate their long term investment risks.

How will SEO landscape change with Google Instant?

Challenges for SEO managers will not be easy. With diminishing long-tail inventory, SEO will need to focus on popular search terms, which, by no means is a mean task. Changes in SEO will also need to be made frequently, in line with the changing keyword trends. Where relevant, optimization for local search terms will help. Due to the instant display of results, fewer users will need to scroll down the page. This means that “above the fold” results will become prime property. Clients would no longer be happy with the top-10 ranking and may demand top-4 rank instead, making the SEO’s job even harder.

Gaming the Google Instant Predictive Search System

It is important to note that the predictive search suggestions of Google Instant is not about suggesting important terms, but suggesting “popular” terms. For search terms, which do not have a high search volume (or for long-tail keywords), it is easy to “game the system” by artificially inflating search terms popularity.

Several years ago, we ran a test on WordTracker keyword research tool. At the time, WordTracker used to fetch search data from only Dogpile & MetaCrawler search engines, which had a miniscule search market share. Since it was easy to game these two ‘low traffic’ search engines, we artificially inflated a ‘test query string’ search in these search engines and discovered that the test search term indeed appeared ‘high’ in WordTracker’s keyword search count, just a few weeks later. Similarly, search terms for low-volume searches can be pushed up in the Google’s predictive suggestions. This manipulation of Google Instant was successfully tried for the term “Nathan Deal Ethics” to highlight the allegations against Nathan for corruptions.

As the dust settles down, the users will get more comfortable by evolving their own techniques of narrowing down their search queries. Perhaps over a period of time, a new usage trend may emerge. How the PPC & SEO landscape will shape up over the next one year may be difficult to predict. However, one thing seems to be clear – with one masterstroke, Google has ensured higher revenues from PPC advertisers; made SEO a lot more difficult and with increased search pattern of distracted searchers, increased their page-views (read market share.)

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So have you made up your mind to give pay-per-click marketing a try?

PPC is one of the most affordable advertising options available to small and large businesses. But like most advertising, you need to have a good strategy to get your money’s worth.

Normally, a lot of people running their first PPC campaign make mistakes that can quickly turn expensive.

This article will offer some basic advice about bidding and choosing keywords to help you run a smart PPC campaign.

The most important thing to know before starting your PPC campaign is how much you can afford to bid for a keyword. High traffic keywords on Google – the leading PPC providers – can cost $8.00 per click for a top ranking.

Can you afford that?

Consider this: the typical e-commerce site converts about 3% of its visitors. That means you need to bring 50 visitors to your site before you make a sale. At $8.00 per click, you’ll spend $400 dollars to generate one sale.

Also keep in mind that you usually want one of the top 3 listings for a keyword. So you’re caught in a catch-22: you want a high PPC ranking to get traffic, but the top rankings for popular words are too expensive.

The solution is to cast your net on a large scale, targeting a large number of less popular keywords. These words are usually less expensive and, taken as a group, can give you a considerable volume of traffic.

It’s common for PPC advertisers to target thousands of keywords. I’ve managed PPC campaigns for clients using over 1500 words.

The downside is that it can be difficult to manage a large number of keywords. You’ll want to track your ads, making sure your rankings haven’t dropped. Plus, you’ll want to know which keywords are sending you traffic and converting visitors into actual clients.

Many companies also outsource the management of their PPC campaigns. Most SEOs now offer PPC management services. These options cost money, but they usually pay and justify for themselves by running your campaigns very efficiently.

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Conversion 1-Per-Click Or Many-Per-Click?

We know different campaign goals often require different success metrics. If you want to drive online purchases, you probably look at the total number of sales, so if one person buys three items from your web site, you’d want to count three sales. But if you’re measuring leads, you may care more about unique leads, so if the same person fills out a lead form three times on your site, you’d want to count them only once.

Today, I will be clarifying the conversion terminology on the AdWords Report Center and conversion tracking tool pages. “Conversions” columns are now labeled Conversions (1-per-click), while “Transactions” columns are now called Conversions (many-per-click). The current AdWords campaign management pages display 1-per-click conversions, so if one click leads to multiple conversions, they’re counted only once. On the other hand, many-per-click conversions count each conversion that occurs after a click on your ad.

Here’s an example to explain the difference: Let’s say you’re selling plumbing supplies online and you’ve set up conversion tracking on your “Thank You For Your Purchase” and your “Newsletter Subscription Confirmed” pages.

If a customer clicks on your ad, buys a plumbing device, then subscribes to your newsletter, you’ll see two many-per-click conversions, but just a single 1-per-click conversion in your account. If the same customer returns to your site a few days later and buys another tool (but doesn’t click on one of your AdWords ads to get there), you’ll now see three many-per-click conversions, but your 1-per-click conversions will still remain at one.

By focusing on many-per-click conversions, you may be able to more easily compare AdWords campaign performance with the performance of your other online advertising campaigns, since a lot of online ad serving and search campaign management tools use many-per-click conversions as the default conversion metric.

I hope these reporting changes to conversion tracking will make it simpler for you to manage your campaigns with a wide variety of advertising goals.

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Online Advertising Trends to Watch in 2010

Markets begin the New Year refreshed after a strong rebound, leaving many advertisers wonder what trends they can expect to see in 2010. Here is what we can expect to see this year:

1. Re-targeting: Retargeting is the procedure of promoting your website to people who have visited your website in the past. This is usually done through banner ads displayed on the users’ favorite sites as they surf the internet. While there are quite a few companies that already concentrate on this service, 2010 will most likely be the year when the most important search engines will introduce this service in their paid search programs.
2. Display advertising. While paid search has been focused more on text ads in the past, we’ve seen major growth this year in the display ad market. In 2009, we saw the search engines introduce some great tools to help in creating display ads. With these new tools in place and more websites jumping on the content network bandwagon, we should see an even greater focus on display ads in 2010.
3. Contextual advertising. The search engines have made huge strides to improve the quality of their content networks over the last several years. As a result, more and more companies have seen positive ROI from contextual advertising. In 2010, we will continue to see these networks grow as more companies realize their value and see new marketing opportunities arise.
4. Mobile advertising. With the rise of 3G phones in the last year, we’ve already seen huge growth in the mobile advertising market. As new phones come on the market and cell phone carriers improve their 3G services, we should continue to see drastic growth in the mobile advertising space. To prepare, advertisers should optimize landing pages now to provide an enhanced user experience to mobile Web users.

It may take some practice, so start out slowly, but if you’re ready to take your PPC efforts to a new and lucrative level, try these in available options in the year 2010!

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Keyword Traffic Estimator

I wanted to make you all familiar with one of the PPC tools, using this blog. Use the Traffic Estimator tool to find out how the keywords you are suggesting, going to perform. This tool helps to estimate the Max CPC of the keywords we select, the estimated ad position for those particular keywords, estimated clicks & cost per day. The estimates are based on the bid amounts and geographical targeting selections. We can also download the file in a .csv format and share it with the clients. It is an external tool and easily available when you search for it on Google.

I am attaching a screenshot of the tool for your convenience. I have used the keyword ‘fresh flower’ as an example. You can change the keywords and try. Please let me know if you have any questions about the tool or it’s usage.

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Your PPC campaign – Why is it more lucrative in the hands of professionals?

So many times, we come across people who are in a dilemma of whether they should handle a PPC campaign on their own or should they outsource it to some internet marketing agency and leave the job to the professionals. If you ask this question to me, I would say – Unless you are not an ‘Adwords Qualified Professional’, it’s better to outsource it to a specialized agency because of its sheer time and complexity factor. In a PPC campaign, stakes are high and you have to be really spontaneous and have to constantly track your ads to see what’s working and what’s not. PPC is not only about driving traffic to your website, but its about driving ‘qualified’ traffic to your website. Following are more reasons, why it’s advisable to count on professionals:

1. Click fraud: Even though Google, Yahoo! & MSN are doing a reasonably good job to detect click frauds so far, but unfortunately fraudulent clicks still effect almost all PPC campaigns. An online marketing agency can work with dedicated PPC professionals equipped with customized PPC tools and third party PPC solutions like click tracks to detect, report and get refunded for any kind of click fraud.
2. Qualiy Score: Quality Score is the basis for search engines to measure the quality and relevance of your ads. Quality score also determines your minimum CPC bid for Google and the search network. Quality score is proportional to your keyword’s click through rate (CTR) on Google, and the relevance of your Google ad, keyword, and yes, landing page too. Quality score directly effects your keywords minimum cost per click and its position in the search results. So if you are just an average internet marketer, you can have a hard time achieving and maintaining good quality score.
3. Keyword research is the main stay of any PPC campaign. Guess work can hurt you a lot. Only an online marketing firm with an in-depth understanding of SEO/SEM will find you the most profitable keywords which will bring you qualified traffic. It’s imoportant to differentiate between keywords that bring ‘only traffic’ and the keywords that bring ‘sales convertible traffic‘.
4. Experience: It’s not easy for a non-professional to understand and profitably implement the concepts of SEO, landing page relevancy and quality score to his PPC campaign. SEO/SEM companies do this every day and can quickly identify problem areas and take corrective measures instantly. And moreover, Google and Yahoo! update their protocols regularly. One has to stay updated all the time.
5. Time: PPC is not a one time implementation but rather an ongoing profitability process. Time is money, and PPC management can be a real time consuming task. Hiring professionals for your PPC requirements will definitely save your time and you will be able to concentrate more on other high ROI activities of your business.
6. PPC ideas tend to cross pollinate within (and sometimes even outside) an industry genre. If one thing works well in case of one company, there is a high probability that it will also work for the other related companies as well. So why not leverage on someone’s experience?

It is quite obvious that PPC is not an alternative to SEO; for real profitability both must go hand in hand. Running a PPC campaign requires a deep knowledge about Search Engines and as I mentioned above – time is money. You should outsource PPC to safer hands and utilize your time in other aspects of your online business.
PS: Please don’t take this blog post as a sales call, infact it is some thing that every smart entrepreneur should do if he understands the difference between traffic and qualified traffic. Generating qualified traffic requires real Internet expertise.

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