Knowledge is the Foundation To Success  

If you have been to Google.com recently you have probably seen the latest innovation from the Google – Google Instant.  Joining the ranks of instant coffee, instant rice, instant cameras, instant mashed potatoes, instant Jell-O, instant oatmeal, instant messaging and more – on Wednesday, September 8, 2010 Google announced Google Instant.  Described as “an innovative new Google.com interface that creates an interactive search experience for users by predicting their query as they type and instantly showing updated results,” Google Instant boasts that it can shave 2-5 seconds off each Google search.  After some experimentation with the new Google Instant interface, I can’t deny – it is very slick.  How does it predict what I am going to type?  Apparently the Google Instant algorithms are just that smart.

After testing out Google Instant, the first question we had here at JumpFly was: “How will this affect the Pay Per Click(PPC) Marketing for our clients?”  With ads showing up before the entire search term was typed out, we were curious about the effect this would have on the number of impressions and click-through-rate (CTR) of our ads.  So we dug a little deeper and found out some details that may help explain Google Instant’s impact on PPC a little bit.

There are three different situations that Google Instant counts impressions:.

1.  Any click on the page – If the user begins to type a search query and then clicks anywhere on the page, an impression is counted.  This includes clicking on a search result, a sponsored link, spelling correction or a related search.

2.  Search selection – If the user clicks the Search button, presses Enter or clicks on one of the predicted queries, an impression is counted.

3.  ‘Three second rule’ – If the user stops typing and the search results are displayed for at least three seconds, an impression is counted.

That being said, we must anticipate that Google Instant will increase the amount of impressions received by the keywords in our accounts.  Hopefully this increase of potentially frivolous impressions will not have the negative impact on CTR that we would expect.  As we have talked about before, a poor CTR can be a detriment to Google AdWords Quality Score forcing advertisers to increase their maximum cost-per-click (CPC) in order to be seen in higher positions in the search results.

Only time will tell how Google Instant will impact the Google AdWords accounts of the hundreds of thousands of businesses who advertise their goods and services on Google.com.  Hopefully Google Instant will be a good thing, providing timelier search results to users and more qualified clicks to advertisers.  Fingers crossed – Google, please don’t disappoint!

Last week Google AdWords announced improvements to Ads Quality, and today that update went live. Two new changes have been introduced that enhance how Google calculates Quality Score and Ranks Ads.

As you might know, click through rate (CTR) is arguably the most significant component of Quality Score, and ads in higher positions tend to earn better CTR than ads that display in lower positions. Google decided that to accurately calculate the Quality Scores, the “influence of ad position on CTR be taken into account and removed from the Quality Score.”

As a result, Google has now updated the portion of the Quality Score algorithm that accounted for ad position. It is their belief that this new adjustment will result in a more accurate Quality Score and ensure that ads compete fairly for position based on their quality and bid, while rewarding high-quality advertisers with better ad positions.

In the past, here at JumpFly, we have certainly seen the advantage of placing some clients’ new keywords in prominent positions to start, and then pull them down later based on performance. The advantage of the increased CTR from the higher initial positioning would work to their advantage down the road. From the sound of this latest update, this particular strategy may no longer be necessary. It will be interesting to see.

The second update going live today is an “improvement” in the way Google determines which ads show in the prominent yellow region directly above the search results. Google believes that given the prominence of these positions that it is especially important for ads to be high quality. Therefore, to appear above the search results, ads must meet a certain quality threshold.

You may have noticed that sometimes Google chooses not to display any ads in this position. Previously, if the ad with the highest Ad Rank did not meet the necessary quality threshold, they would not show any ads in these positions. With the new update, Google will now allow an ad that meets the quality threshold to actually jump over an ad in a higher position and be displayed in this prominent position. Again, quality plays a very important roll in being able to show in higher positions.

There is no doubt that these new algorithm changes by Google will cause some ads to experience a change in position, spend, and/or performance. Changes in Google’s ranking algorithms can affect even the most stable Google AdWords PPC account. Talk to a professional PPC Management Company today about how this recent update might affect your Google AdWords account.