At the end of May Google announced plans to integrate paid adverts into their Suggest functionality and ever since then I have been keeping a close eye on the suggestions offered to me when I search. That will sound really geeky to most of you but this new strategy could have a significant impact on the way that paid advertising on Google works, so to ensure that we stay ahead of the game we need to make sure that we know about such changes as soon as they are implemented.
If you are not sure why this is such a big change let me explain. When adverts are displayed in the list of suggestions presented to a user they will likely take you straight through to the landing page of the advert, thus eliminating the need to visit the Google search results page. It is on this search results page that paid adverts have traditionally been displayed, providing the user with a number of choices as to where they go next to find the information they are looking for. If they don’t see a search results page then they won’t see our adverts – and if they don’t see our adverts then we are not going to make a sale! So in order to ensure that we don’t lose ad impressions we must do everything we can to get our adverts, and those of our clients, amongst the first to be displayed by the Google Suggest function.
As such I believe we need to keep a close eye on this development and make sure that we turn it to our advantage, but I don’t necessarily think that this is a good move by Google! Surely the whole point of using a Search Engine is to see a collection of results which are relevant to the search that you have made – but by encouraging you to simply click on an advert from a list of suggested search terms Google are reducing your option to choose which search result is most relevant to you. Also, by reducing the amount of information that you see before clicking on a link which takes you directly to a website (I am assuming that ad-text won’t be visible in the suggestions) will undoubtedly lead to a rise in the number of bounces and click-throughs from people who aren’t really looking for what you have to offer. In the short term I imagine that this will increase the revenue that Google generates from its paid adverts, but in the long run surely the negatives of users getting fed up of landing on irrelevant sites, and the advertisers reconsidering their PPC spend as conversions rates drop will outweigh this boost in revenue?
Ultimately though I guess we will just have to wait and see what impact this change has on paid search, after all Google has made changes before and they are rarely wrong so I will reserve judgement at the moment.
In the meantime I’ll continue to look out for these new advert suggestions and report back when I spot one.