I was recently invited by Google to co-keynote a summit on higher education marketing at their headquarters in Mountain View. My presentation focused on “the 10 new rules of branding” which highlight the importance of things like customer service, social media and authenticity when it comes to marketing and creating great brands.
I had an amazing time with the Google team. While not my first adventure at their HQ, I always enjoy my visits and the hospitality of all the employees I encounter.
It’s truly remarkable that this company didn’t exist 15 years ago – and how far it’s come since then.
Google has redefined employee benefits, and business partner hospitality. If you haven’t had the opportunity to visit their HQ in Mountain View, CA, I encourage you to schedule a visit sometime soon.
Google’s auto complete feature suggests the search words/phrases that most commonly match what you are typing in real time.
For example, if nearly everyone typing “and” end up typing “android”, Google will suggest that through it’s auto complete feature, designed to save you time. It’s also designed to “help” your searching by showing you what the majority of other people typing similar phrases selected.
As you type, autocomplete predicts and displays queries to choose from. The search queries that you see as part of autocomplete are a reflection of the search activity of all web users and the content of web pages indexed by Google. If you’re signed in to your Google Account and have Web History enabled, you might also see search queries from relevant searches that you’ve done in the past. In addition, Google+ profiles can sometimes appear in autocomplete when you search for a person’s name. Apart from the Google+ profiles that may appear, all of the predicted queries that are shown in the drop-down list have been typed previously by Google users or appear on the web.
For certain queries, Google will show separate predictions for just the last few words. Below the word that you’re typing in the search box, you’ll see a smaller drop-down list containing predictions based only on the last words of your query. While each prediction shown in the drop-down list has been typed before by Google users or appears on the web, the combination of your primary text along with the completion may be unique.
But does this really benefit users? Sure, it’s a time saver, but it may also steer people away from less common phrases that may in fact be more accurate.
Source: Google — Sample of auto complete feature for “new…”
Why does that matter?
As more people use auto complete and select the most common results for the suggested phrase, the more Google will continue to show those suggested results, further pushing down the less popular results.
Showing more popular results is part of nearly all search engine algorithms, but if you consistently steer users towards one option over another, that other option will be artificially increased in affinity/popularity.
This could be really bad for a business. Let’s say someone searches for a company and they want to read about negative reviews/scams. So they search for the company’s name + scams. If a few more people do it, it may get picked up by the auto complete algorithm.This means every time someone searches for the company’s name moving forward, “scams” will be suggested until enough people stop clicking that phrase to tell Google otherwise. Wouldn’t a user who otherwise was not looking to read scams be somewhat intrigued to click that suggested term, even if that’s not their original intent? And every click reinforces “scam” as a suggested term. It then becomes harder and harder for a business to reverse this – even if there are no scams or negative reviews to begin with.
This is very similar to the term “google bombing“. Where users can potentially “game” Google’s search algorithm. Albeit, the good folks at Google are always working on improving the algorithm to reduce this, it can still happen.
Don’t get me wrong – I love Google. But, I’d love to see some studies on the psychological and socioeconomic impacts of suggesting terms.
Jackson’s article is more than compelling – its nearly dead-on accurate with regards to how technologies evolve faster than companies. So, its difficult for companies that have devoted their resources heading down one path to get up, back track and head down a new path. This is especially difficult in the face of competitors who get a fresh start down a new branch.
Think of a tree. Start with the trunk. That’s the start of technology… And as companies create products based upon this technology they head down a branch, say “ecommerce”. However, as they are heading down that branch, a new one sprouts – “mobile commerce”. The problem is, that branch is very different and has its own barriers to entry and competitive forces. Companies on one branch don’t necessarily have the know-how to hop branches and change courses.
Jackson’s article discusses this by breaking down technology into three phases and grouping the big tech companies into those three phases to articulate his point. It’s very compelling.
However, I do believe that many of these newer companies have the cash to acquire technology through M&A so that they can more easily hop branches. Also, I believe some of them have management that will endeavor as best they can to pivot their giant organizations and adapt to change. But this doesn’t always work, as Jackson points out, like in the case of the once almighty MySpace.
Rosetta Stone (makers of the language software) have been given the go ahead by the appeals courts to move their lawsuit against Google to the next stage of the litigation process – a trial.
Rosetta Stone is asserting that Google is serving up Ads triggered by Rosetta Stone’s trademarks. So, when a user types in “Rosetta Stone”, they are seeing ads for other products, thus confusing the consumer.
I have long advocated to not bid directly on the keyword marks of your competitors. It typically does not generate good conversion results in the B2B area in particularly. It’s also a poor business practice that usually results in the other business countering by bidding on your terms. The end result is a bidding war (and the only entity that wins is Google).
However, this case has further implications on broad match and session match. It’s quite possible that Google will have to block session matching whereby it would normally use your search behavior to serve you ads regardless of what your query is… For instance, if I make three searches about cell phones, and then refine my search to smartphones, I still may see ads triggered by the original “cell phone” key phrase. And broad match may kick in if I type “Nokia smart phone” whereby AdWords matches me to a “Samsung smart phone” ad triggered by the “smart phone” portion of my phrase.
If Google will be required to block all marks except to their owner, there’s a lot of work that will be required. Google will need to build a system to verify ownership of marks to enable advertisers to bid on their own marks; and also build a system that blocks ads from appearing on registered marks in any form (broad, session or otherwise).
I just love it when a big company with lots of financial resources puts its money where it’s mouth is.
Today, Google basically put a bounty on any exploits of its Chrome browser by offering cash rewards if hackers can find a bone fide exploit.
This does two things:
First, it’s a public display of Google’s belief that Chrome is solid. In other words, you wouldn’t spend a million bucks (even if you have tons of cash) if you knew you had exploits. So this is Google saying, “we know we’re good” and we’ll prove it with this contest.
Next, its a relatively good way to take advantage of “free” resources within the hacking community that Google would otherwise have to pay. In essence, it’s crowd-sourcing the browser and it will compensate any results. Of course if you don’t find an exploit, you don’t get compensated. So basically Google gets to test Chrome without having to pay the testers.
I’m glad Google continues to invest in keeping Chrome malware and exploit free. It’s not something new (paying hackers for exploits), but it’s still a innovative approach.
As a search marketer, this news is extremely timely, relevant and refreshing. CPCs have been escalating for years as more and more competitors flood search with their ads.
It seems that many improvements that Google has made to scoring ads (QualityScore) and better education of advertising best practices, has lead to an increase in the quality of ads and advertising campaigns. This has made the campaigns more efficient, which then can often lower the cost of advertising and CPCs. To summarize at a really high level, higher quality ads don’t necessarily need the highest bid to be shown first and win clicks. Google factors in many variables to determine rank.
However, advertisers should not necessarily breathe a sigh of relief. In certain industries that are highly competitive, CPCs may not have declined, and certainly not by 8% as reported. Only your own data will show how your business has been affected. But, it might make you take your foot off the gas a bit and back down on those bids. I have long pondered about what would happen if advertisers all backed off to form a reverse auction, per se… Where everyone kept lowering their bids. A crazy thought of course, one that probably cannot take place in free market capitalism; and it has similarities to a cartel so-to-speak.
Nonetheless, I continue to encourage advertisers to occasionally take their foot of the gas and focus on landing page quality and ad quality versus simply raising their bids constantly. Focusing on the quality will yield better long term results.
It appears that adoption of Google+ continues to accelerate despite critics and nay-sayers who continue to dismiss its relevancy. Of course adoption is simply a count of the number of registered users and doesn’t necessarily correlate to similar numbers for engagement and time on site. But, with Google dominating search, and inserting G+ results into your standard results set, more and more Google+ content is being highlighted to internet users and the +1 buttons are undeniably everywhere. Marketers of content don’t want to be “left out”, so they have rushed to include the +1 button on virtually everything. This has created a massive amount of branding and awareness of the social network. However, it remains to be seen if Google+ can replicate the social success of its target rival, Facebook in terms of engagement and time on site.
And, can the two social networks ultimately co-exist? Not if they serve the same purpose… as who would want to post and engage twice every time they go online? G+ must continue to differentiate itself which becomes a difficult task when your rival can easily mimic your successes.
I’ve long been a major complainer when it comes to low-quality content sites gaming SEO with big bucks and dedicate resources all with the goal of being in the first few organic SERPs (so they can steal traffic from higher quality sites).
The bottom line is that people like myself (and great sites like SEOmoz) are busy producing good content – which is where they should be spending their time; not gaming results to get high rankings like eHow and About.com. If you have ever come across a useful, meaningful article from one of those sites, please let me know.
However, those sites bring Google billions of dollars because of ad sharing programs such as AdWords.
But, Google has finally realized that if users find valuable content, that quality user experience will pay better dividends in the long run versus spammy sites or low value sites.
So, Google has been rolling out a number of new programs that place emphasis on social signals, authority and semantics and a little bit less on “all that other stuff” that big companies have mastered gaming over the past 5-10 years.
Those with Apple iPhone 4s devices may be less inclined to run text searches on Google.com as they grow more comfortable with interfacing with the Siri voice interaction platform. Furthermore, Google voice search and the probably development and maturation of voice interactivity embedded into more and more devices will ultimate force a shift in the way consumers interact with advertising on the internet. One can hardly assume ads will go away. They never have. In fact, with each new technology, ads seem to become even more prolific than on the previous technologies. Consider it sort of the Moore’s Law of paid search advertising.
So what is in store for paid ads if I never visit an actual search engine? Perhaps when I ask for “restaurants near Reston, VA” the system will deliver two sets of results? Or, will the results be intertwined? And if so, how will I know as a consumer which results are sponsored and which are organic? And where to social signals play in all of this? Maybe it’s important to me that three of my friends recommend on restaurant over another, or that one restaurant is offering a half-off coupon?
Advertising is an important aspect of the consumer experience and ultimately underwrites the fact that the internet is essentially free.
Will Apple build its own ad network for Siri usurping Google altogether? That’s a definite probability if not a certainty. Look at iTunes. It’s a complete silo from the internet, controlled fully by Apple.
The voice interactivity is a vast uncharted pioneer town ripe for entrepreneurs and bright ideas to move in and conquer.
Just what will be next for consumers and advertisers alike? Ask Siri, maybe she knows.
Now that Google is indexing JavaScript-originated content, such as Facebook comments, businesses may start seeing a shift in search engine results. What does this mean for you? Well, if there is a lot of buzz on the net about your business, and that buzz is contained in Facebook comments, searchers may now be exposed to said buzz – good or bad!
This underscores two powerful needs:
It is now more important than ever to monitor your company’s buzz. This will ensure if there is negative sentiment about your brand, you can quickly and proactively address it.
If you are not engaging with your customers on sites such as Facebook and blogs, you are missing out an opportunity to generate positive buzz and equally important earned media.
So, get cracking on your Facebook and social media engagement and monitoring strategy. Before you know it your rank in search results may just start rising!
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